General Practitioners: Appointments

Lord Trefgarne: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What progress has been made by the Prime Minister's review regarding the 48-hour restrictive appointment booking system for general practitioners.

Lord Warner: My Lords, as the Prime Minister promised, we have looked again at the delivery of the 24/48 hour access target for primary care. In June, primary care trust data showed that less than 1 per cent of patients were denied the opportunity by their practices to book appointments more than two days ahead. Virtually all patients can now see a GP within 48 hours, compared with only about half in 1997. GPs and their staff are to be congratulated on that improved access for patients.

Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I am greatly obliged to the Minister for that reply. Is he aware that we are not complaining about the need to get in quickly, but those occasions when we want to make an appointment for a routine matter, perhaps a few days or even a week ahead? Is the Minister aware that I am, unhappily, in the 1 per cent to which he refers?

Lord Warner: My Lords, I am extremely disturbed to know that the noble Lord is in that 1 per cent, but minorities have a problem sometimes. The work of the National Primary Care Development Team is going on with practices to make sure that people in the situation of the noble Lord are not denied a more flexible access.

Lord Laming: My Lords, does the noble Lord agree, first, that the time has come for a major review of primary care services in this country, not least their accessibility or their inaccessibility; secondly, that the range of services is far too narrow at the present time; and thirdly, that, perhaps in some instances, there needs to be a change in attitude towards their customers?

Lord Warner: My Lords, we know from surveys of the public that there is huge public confidence in our general practitioner service, which is—perhaps I may put it this way—one of the jewels in the crown of the NHS. But the Government are planning a widespread consultation later this year on services outside hospitals, which will lead to a White Paper towards the turn of the year.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, do many practices run the type of practice that my GP does, which provides an open clinic for emergencies, and other appointments are booked? I must say that it works very well. No one is turned away if there is an emergency, yet one can book further ahead.

Lord Warner: My Lords, a wide variety of arrangements operate through general practice providing access to patients for different services. I do not have the details of those particular arrangements, but, as I said in my earlier reply, a very small minority, unfortunately including the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, are being denied the flexibility that we all seek.

Lord McNally: My Lords, the point made during the general election campaign was that some practices were misinterpreting the guidelines and thinking that they could not have forward booking. The problem is not as narrow as the Minister is suggesting to the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne. Is any best practice guidance given to practices to make it clear that they can and should offer long-term booking for non-urgent appointments, which is greatly to the advantage of patients?

Lord Warner: My Lords, widespread guidance about good practice is available to all practices. The noble Lord is right. At the time of the election, the latest data showed a larger number of patients not receiving the kind of flexibility that I have described. But that has now changed. Our latest information from primary care trusts, which are monitoring the situation, including using mystery shopper techniques, is that about 1 per cent of all people are denied the kind of flexibility that we are looking for.

Lord McColl of Dulwich: My Lords, as the general practitioners are rewarded financially if they keep within the 48-hour target, what happens to the general practice where most patients want an appointment in a week's time?

Lord Warner: My Lords, general practitioners are required to produce speedy and flexible access. I am not sure whether I can find many more ways of describing what is going on other than to repeat that there is guidance available and we monitor the performance of GPs in relation to the contracts they sign.

Lord McColl of Dulwich: My Lords, with all due respect, the Minister has not answered my question. If general practitioners are rewarded financially for keeping to the 48-hour target and in some general practices the patients do not want to be seen within 48 hours, are the general practitioners thereby financially deprived?

Lord Warner: My Lords, the reward system relates to the delivery of the speedy access targets—it does not relate to the flexibility arrangements. You cannot have a financial penalty if you do not require someone to do something and they then do not do it. I think that the noble Lord misunderstands the nature of the contract with the general practitioners, which may be because he comes from a hospital background.

Noble Lords: Oh!

Viscount Falkland: My Lords, what action would the Minister recommend to GPs and medical centres where each month a large number of appointments are not kept? There are recidivist patients, if I may say so, who repeatedly do not turn up for appointments.

Lord Warner: My Lords, we do not micro-manage the general practice services. We leave general practitioners to maintain their own arrangements, provided they are meeting the requirements on their contract for speedy access and provided, as we are trying to ensure, they do not use that as an excuse not to have sufficient flexibility.

Baroness Carnegy of Lour: My Lords, has the Minister tried making an appointment with his local practice? You ring up at the given time and continue to dial for half an hour. When you finally get through, you then find that that day is full; you may then be late for work. Has the Minister tried that? It is not as satisfactory as he thinks, and I am sorry that he has brushed off my noble friends in the way he has.

Lord Warner: My Lords, I have tried the system at my general practice. It provides a flexible and speedy service that is a credit to the practice. I am not trying to brush off anybody; I am trying to give the House information. I am afraid that some noble Lords just do not accept the information.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, why does not the Minister accept that this is a very silly piece of guidance? Instead of making personal remarks about my noble friend, he would do much better to go back to his friends and point out that in a large number of cases, not just a minority, the doctor wants to see a patient in three weeks, a month or two months' time and says, "Come back and see me then". That is when the difficulty arises. The guidance is not flexible enough to accommodate that. It should be, and the Minister should remind his colleagues accordingly.

Lord Warner: My Lords, I did not intend any unkindness; I am sorry that there is so much sensitivity on the other side of the House this morning. I will repeat what I said in the Answer: the information from the primary care trusts available to the Government shows that about 1 per cent of patients do not have the flexibility which the noble Lord and his colleagues require, and which we all support—but it is 1 per cent. According to the information available to me, 99 per cent of people receive that flexibility. I am very sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, comes under that figure of 1 per cent.

Armenian Massacres of 1915

Baroness Cox: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether they will reconsider their position with regard to the recognition of the Armenian massacres of 1915 as genocide.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the long-standing position of Her Majesty's Government is well known. The British Government acknowledge the strength of feeling about this terrible episode of history and recognise the massacres of 1915–16 as a tragedy. However, neither this Government nor previous British governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these events should be categorised as genocide as defined by the 1948 UN convention on genocide.

Baroness Cox: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Does he agree that every unrecognised genocide encourages other potential genocides, as shown by Hitler's infamous statement before invading Poland: "Who today speaks of the Armenians?"?
	The testimony of respected contemporary witnesses shows that the massacres of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey would certainly fit the contemporary definition of genocide. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that their refusal to acknowledge this does not give implicit encouragement to other perpetrators of would-be genocides or, indeed, inhibit Turkey from recognising this, which is a precondition for healing and reconciliation?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I say unequivocally that what took place was by any standards an atrocity of the first order. The judgment required under the United Nations convention is that it can be demonstrated that a state had intent. That is the element that the lawyers have concluded is not shown in this case. That is why the difference is made. However, that does not alter the fact that every nation responsible for atrocities on such a scale needs to face them, think about them and consider what can be done or said to help to heal some of the wound that was caused, even if some time ago.

Lord Archer of Sandwell: My Lords, does my noble friend accept that the issue is not so much what the Turkish Government did as their present attitude to the atrocities? Given that it is now a criminal offence in Turkey to refer to the genocide, that an academic seminar supported by three Turkish universities was banned by the Government and that academics are in prison for discussing it, is my noble friend a little troubled that admitting Turkey to the European Union—not after but while the Government demonstrate this contempt for human rights—may debase the ethical implications of EU membership?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, it is true that the issue has not been set as a precondition for negotiations with Turkey over accession to the European Union, which, as I said to your Lordships yesterday, will start on 3 October. On the other hand, there is no doubt that progress needs to be made and that it must be substantive. The United Kingdom Government have attempted to move this process on. In March 2005, at an EU Ministerial Troika with Turkey, my right honourable friend Denis MacShane suggested to Turkey that there should be an independent international commission to review the events of 1915.
	Subsequently, the Turkish Prime Minister wrote to the Armenian President and offered to collaborate in such a review. I submit to the House that the review might well reach the conclusion that there was genocide because that is not ruled out. I am not prejudging what the review might do. But unfortunately the proposal was not accepted by the Armenians unless the border issue and recognition were resolved first. It is quite hard to see how progress can be made easily.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, the Minister will recall the official British government inquiry into these atrocities under Lord Bryce in 1915, which established beyond doubt that huge and systematic massacres had taken place. Speaking for myself and for many others, although there is sympathy with modern Turkey's position and its desire to move into effective membership of the European Union, might it not be useful for the British Government to tell our Turkish friends—to nudge them, as it were—that a more open approach on this matter than the one rightly described by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Archer, might help Turkey's general position and prospects of membership of the European Union?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I sympathise wholly with what my noble and learned friend Lord Archer and the noble Lord, Lord Howell, have just said. That is precisely why my right honourable friend Denis MacShane urged that on the Turkish Government. Given how static this position has been for so long, we took some comfort that they were prepared to accept a completely independent international commission to review the events. That itself is the beginning of significant change. It is not the change itself but the beginning of the change. We should continue to encourage that process.

Lord McCluskey: My Lords, I speak as one who supports Turkey's application to join the European Union. However, do Her Majesty's Government recognise that the conduct of modern Turkey dismays many who support the application to join and creates real obstacles to its success? I refer: first, to its refusal to acknowledge the fact of the massacre of more than a million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire; secondly, to its enactment of the provision to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Archer, referred—Article 305 of the Turkish penal code making journalists and others liable to criminal prosecution for using the word "genocide" in Turkey; and, thirdly, to the continuation of the blockade that has been referred to.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, there is no reference in the penal code itself to that. There is an explanatory note to Article 305, which has the impact described. However, I am told that it is not legally binding. I also make it clear that the European Commission expects the language to be taken into account in interpreting Article 305 because it would not be acceptable to the European Union to interpret it in such a damaging way.
	Good relations with neighbouring states require that there should be open and flexible discussion of borders. That requires discussion not just with Armenia, but also with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. That is, again, slightly complex, but we are encouraging that border discussion.

Lord Avebury: My Lords, is the Minister aware that in 1999 when I sent Joyce Quin, the then Minister for Europe, a list of 400 bibliographical references on the genocide, she said that the Foreign Office did not have time to study them? In view of the fact that, since then, the Bryce Blue Book has been reprinted with all the references and that archives from Germany and Turkey have been put into the public domain, does the noble Lord not think that the Foreign Office should at least thoroughly re-examine the evidence?

Lord Triesman: Yes, my Lords, for I am one of life's perpetual students. I do not mean to be at all frivolous about the subject of genocide, for there is no subject more telling in our recent modern history. I will most certainly study that.

United Nations Secretary-General

Lord Judd: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What criteria and methodology they will be advocating within the United Nations for the appointment of the next Secretary-General.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the Secretary-General is chosen in two steps. The Security Council first nominates a candidate whom the General Assembly must then approve by general vote. We do not advocate any change to that methodology. On criteria, the Government want to see the best person appointed, someone who will provide effective leadership of the UN as it addresses the interlinked challenges of development, security and human rights that face the modern world.

Lord Judd: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that overall we have been well served by Secretaries-General of the United Nations but that, every day, global events underline the crucial significance of the appointment? The high level report on the future of the United Nations has emphasised that. Would the Minister not therefore agree that now is the time to seek political agreement—as widespread as possible—on the criteria and character of the person for whom we are looking? That is so that, next time, we can have a strong, effective Secretary-General and not be subjected to a political compromise cobbled together at the last moment.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the Secretaries-General of the United Nations have been a distinguished group of international servants. They have served us well, and the refinement of criteria will be an extremely important factor, when a selection comes along. However, Kofi Annan's term of office runs to the end of 2006, and he has not announced that he will not run for a third term. We do not prejudge the issue of whether he will in any way. It would not be proper to do so, as he is doing an exceptional job. No doubt, when the choice comes to be made, the criteria must serve all the functions that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, has described to the House.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My Lords, would the Minister agree that, now that Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa have all held the office for considerable periods, the next appointment—if it is not to be a continuation of Kofi Annan's term—should not be based on a pre-determined regional origin? It is possible to break out of that now.
	Would he not also agree that, sticking to the present procedure that he outlined for appointment, there could be major improvements in the transparency of the process? For example, if the Security Council were to appoint a search committee, candidates could be asked to put forward their views on how the organisation should be run and directed in the period ahead. If that could be introduced, it would be a huge improvement over the smoke-filled room procedures that have prevailed up to now.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I am certainly never going to advocate selection by procedures in smoke-filled rooms; I cannot stand cigarette smoke.
	It is our wish to see the appointment of the best person who meets the criteria, not simply the serving of some sort of geographical term, as that would not necessarily produce that result. The one thing that I would say about the selection process is that it is inevitable, if we are candid about it, that the person selected will need to be able to work with the major powers. That is just a reality. The process should be as transparent as possible, and it is bound to be the case that everyone will want to see candidates—and then a candidate—emerging with that capability.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, would it not be appropriate for a Government who, I trust, support stronger global institutions to launch an initiative on a reconsideration of how the Secretaries-General of not just the United Nations but of a number of other international agencies are appointed? The way in which the IMF and the World Bank appointments were made seems to have followed outdated bargains struck between the Europeans and the Americans rather too long ago. We have had difficulties appointing the Secretary-General of the World Trade Organisation. Would it not be helpful if the British Government made proposals on how we might improve the process of selecting the leaders of global institutions?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, perhaps I may, with the greatest respect, restrict my answer to the United Nations. It would take a long and significant debate to deal with the Bretton Woods financial institutions because of the particular functions that they serve.
	It is my understanding that the members of the United Nations in general are confident about the Security Council process for arriving at the nomination of a candidate, followed by the election of that person by the United Nations as a whole. It would benefit from greater transparency, as would all the processes, but it would be unwise to shake loose something on which the international community has agreed as a process. In general, getting that kind of agreement is pretty hard.

Lord Davies of Coity: My Lords, I recognise that we all want to see the best person possible become the next Secretary-General of the United Nations, but does my noble friend feel that, in view of the fact that leaders of the G8 countries recently met to address major issues of global warming and making poverty history in Africa and in order to secure the best possible strength and influence in a Secretary-General, he or she should come from one of the G8 countries?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I do not reach that conclusion. Kofi Annan does not come from that background. I saw at first hand the extraordinary impact that he had on the discussions at Gleneagles. He was one of the great forces for making progress in the areas of deep concern to the United Kingdom. So, it is possible to do it, with respect to my noble friend, without being a member of the G8. Whoever it is, he or she needs to have the confidence of the Security Council, the G8 and others, which is why there is bound to be some discussion in the run-up. I do not think that it has to be a G8 member.

Lord Dykes: My Lords, notwithstanding—

Lord Grocott: My Lords, it is time for the next Question.

HMS "Invincible"

Lord Astor of Hever: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What impact the early decommissioning of HMS "Invincible" will have on the operational capability of the United Kingdom's Armed Forces.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, although HMS "Invincible" will be placed into very low readiness later this year, she will remain available to the Royal Navy until she is withdrawn from service in 2010. This measure has long been planned and in no way jeopardises the Navy's current operational commitments.

Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. In the light of his Answer, what is the monetary value that will be released by the government plans for this fine ship, and when will those resources be available to fund other defence purposes?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, the resources that will be released by putting "Invincible" into a state of very low readiness are already part of the overall plan we are using to focus logistics support on ships that are undertaking high-priority tasks. This is already happening. These are tasks where we require ships at high readiness, and we need to make sure that these ships that we are most likely to need are available. It is also in the context of the very significant investment which we are making into new warship building, which is going on at present. A very substantial number of ships—eight ships—are currently being built.

Lord Boyce: My Lords, the untimely decommissioning of "Invincible", together with the lower levels of readiness in the Fleet institutionalised by the MoD some months ago because of lack of in-year cash, makes the Navy even less able to play its part in delivering the Government's ever more hollow-sounding mantra "force for good". Will the Minister say which Royal Navy directed "force for good" tasks being done prior to April 2004 are not now being done as a result of last year's unwise slashing of six perfectly capable and modern destroyer frigates from the front line?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord raises the issue of the changes that need to take place in the application of the Royal Navy to the operations that we face today. As we announced, the reduction that we have made to the destroyer and frigate fleet maintains the Royal Navy's ability to respond to a wide range of contingencies including war fighting. What we are doing in shifting these resources is to make sure that the Navy, like our other Armed Forces, is able to meet the changing nature of the threat which this country faces, and the demands on this country in terms of its involvement in both humanitarian and nation-building tasks. We are going through a process of very important change and reform. We should congratulate the Armed Forces on the way in which they are rising to this challenge and on the way in which this process is being managed. The effect is clear that the Navy is able to respond to the task it will be asked to do.

Lord Garden: My Lords, how will we meet one specific commitment under the Helsinki headline goal, where we declared with a fanfare of trumpets that we would have a carrier available at 60 days' readiness? What length is the Minister's extended low readiness—is it 60 days? I suggest that it is probably rather longer than that.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, the noble Lord is correct. Very low readiness means that the ship, HMS "Invincible", will be placed into reserve. Bringing the ship out of this state of very low readiness will take approximately 18 months.

Noble Lords: Oh!

Lord Drayson: However, my Lords, the principle under which this is done is based on the identification of the needs which the Royal Navy will be tasked to undertake in the future. Those operational tasks require the ability to respond in a Carrier Strike capability—basically an aircraft carrier which has fast jets—or in support of an amphibious landing which can be addressed by a landing-platform helicopter ship, such as HMS "Ocean", or a carrier with helicopters on board.
	This plan allows us to meet that requirement. The way in which we are going through the process of refitting our aircraft carriers through to the time when we will have the new carriers available is one which has been planned to take into account the operational requirements which we envisage.

Lord Craig of Radley: My Lords, is it not the case that the withdrawal of the Sea Harrier force has made the continuing running on of HMS "Invincible" unnecessary?

Lord Drayson: My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord raises an important point relating to the Sea Harrier. We recognise that the withdrawal of the Sea Harrier will leave a temporary degradation in the outer layer of air maritime defence for task groups between the withdrawal of the Sea Harrier in 2006 and the arrival of the joint combat aircraft. But the task groups have the layers of defence which we regard as being sufficient to reduce the operational risk. The nature of the expeditionary operations which we envisage the Royal Navy needs to undertake in the future means that the provision of aircraft carriers, such as "Invincible", or landing-platform helicopter carriers, such as "Ocean", is vital. The reason why we need the new carriers coming forward, which is a very significant investment, is to follow the existing "Invincible" class carriers going out of service.

Lord Judd: My Lords, while declaring an interest as the Minister responsible for the Navy when the decision was made to go ahead with "Invincible", I ask whether it would not be appropriate to conclude this exchange with an unqualified tribute to all those who have served on "Invincible" in some of the extremely exacting missions that she has undertaken.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for making that point, and reiterate it. I am sure that the whole House will join him in stating the deep appreciation that the nation has for everyone who has served on that great ship.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, as the House will know, a two-minute silence will be observed at noon today. With the leave of the House, we will of course observe that. It will be signalled wherever we are in the debate; it will presumably be midway through one of our contributions. The Clerk will simply stand, the two-minute silence will be observed, and then we will continue the debate.

Business of the House: Debates this Day

Baroness Amos: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
	Moved, That the debates on the Motions in the names of the Lord Campbell of Alloway and the Lord Baker of Dorking set down for today shall each be limited to three hours and that the debate on the Motion in the name of the Lord Bowness also set down for today shall be limited to one and a half hours.—(Baroness Amos.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, before we start today's debates, I must say an important word about timing. These are both very well subscribed debates; the Opposition obviously chose popular subjects. They are time-limited to three hours, but the arithmetic—we cannot calculate it, obviously, until we know how many people have put their names down to speak—leaves seven minutes for Back-Benchers but only two minutes in the gap. In other words, we have only two minutes to play with.
	Simple arithmetic will tell us that if there are 18 speakers from the Back Benches, as there are in the first debate, it does not take much overrun on the part of each of the 18 speakers to eat up the two minutes and go well into the time for the wind-up. Even long-serving Members, either by accident or design, do not appreciate the basic message of the clock, which is that when seven minutes goes up on the clock in a contribution limited to seven minutes, it means you have gone over your seven minutes. If everyone goes 30 seconds over the seven minutes, we are in deep trouble. I know that I can rely on the total co-operation of this self-regulating House and that, as soon as the seven goes up, the speaker will sit down almost immediately.

Armed Forces: Chain of Command

Lord Campbell of Alloway: rose to call attention to the case for upholding the integrity and legal authority of the Armed Forces chain of command; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, the object of this speech, devoid of political motivation, is to seek to persuade the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, to clear a pathway through the stables of the Ministry of Defence's regime under the aegis of the director of Army Legal Services, in order to uphold integrity and legal authority of lawful decisions of commanding officers taken under military law, and to enjoin that no further request shall be made by the Ministry of Defence to challenge the rectitude of such decisions in such circumstances under the concurrent jurisdiction.
	The Trooper Williams case but exemplifies the woeful ineptitude of the extant ill-conceived regime, which remains of general application to all outstanding cases. Perhaps other noble Lords will deal with other cases. Albeit that the challenge in that case was to no avail, the chain of command and its integrity were none the less impugned, as was the intention, as is wholly apparent from the documents to which reference shall be made in this case.
	Those documents also reveal that this is no little legal difficulty. The decisions of the commanding officers under military law were commended by the trial judge, now a member of your Lordships' Appellate Committee, on the basis that there was no evidence on which a reasonable jury, properly directed, could convict of murder. The charges laid by the Crown Prosecution Service, on reference by the Attorney-General and at the request of the MoD, had, for such reason, to be withdrawn by the Crown at the trial.
	Hence, the concern of the noble and gallant Lords on the Cross Benches, who speak for the three armed services with ultimate authority. On 19 May, the third day of the debate on the Address, this problem was referred to by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge. He referred to the investigations in the case of Trooper Williams, which were instituted by General Sir Anthony Walker. It is right that your Lordships should know that without the general's advice, this speech could never have been made.
	The noble and gallant Lord also expressed his concern for the number of soldiers being investigated for war crimes and said that,
	"British lawyers are hiking their wares in Iraq . . . on a 'no fee, no win' basis".—[Official Report, 19/5/05; col. 144.]
	The noble and gallant Lord also said that those investigating such cases need to understand the real pressure under which our soldiers operate and the fact that the number of cases being investigated is a cause for concern and will undoubtedly affect the morale of our own Armed Forces.
	Against that background, one comes to the Trooper Williams case. In the wake of the collapse of the trial, Trooper Williams, who served with a squadron of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment which was part of the 1st Kings Battle Group in Iraq, and in the wake of the observations of the trial judge, the case for upholding the integrity and legal authority of the chain of command—the bedrock of trust—could already have been made in those proceedings. However, your Lordships' attention will also be drawn to MoD procedures that are to be revisited in this debate and even perhaps, in due course, by amendment to Queens Regulation or the Armed Forces Discipline Act.
	The threat of indictment for war crimes or murder hovers over our armed peacekeepers, in aid of a civil power. In this case, the facts are now fairly well known. The indictment was laid on 7 September. At the trial in February 2005, two weeks after a warning from the judge that if the Crown could not adduce evidence on which the jury could convict, the case would be thrown out. On no previous occasion, in such circumstances, has resort been had to the concurrent jurisdiction.
	Regarding indictments for war crimes, when the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, as Chief of the Defence Staff, sought assurance that armed intervention in Iraq was lawful under public international law, the chain of our command of our Armed Forces entered a new dimension. No such assurance had ever been sought before. Article 8 of the Rome statute envisages the institution of such proceedings in the United Kingdom or before the ICC. As long ago as 10 April 2001, the noble Viscount, Lord Slim, advised the House that this is a matter that occasions "disquiet among field commanders". Can pre-emptive armed action be justified as self-defence in the absence of an immediate substantial threat of attack? It is understood that a number of servicemen, some of field rank, have already been warned that they may be charged.
	As to the procedures, Lieutenant-Colonel Griffin of the 1st Battalion, the Kings Regiment, carried out an investigation, satisfied himself that the shooting was within the rules of engagement, which had been observed, and that no action was necessary. That decision was taken under guidance drafted by Colonel Barnett, the senior legal adviser in Iraq, which was issued on 28 July; that is, post-TELIC 2, the second phase of operations. Then on 18 August, the MoD advised further enquiries.
	On 4 November, the Special Investigation Branch sent its report in favour of a charge of murder to the commanding officer of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment. On 20 November 2003, he dealt with the charge, which had been reported under the Army Act and had been laid contrary to the advice of Colonel Barnett. On the evidence, Colonel Barnett provided a strongly worded minute to the effect that there was no prima facie case and the charge should be dismissed. That advice was highly commended by the trial judge. On 14 February, the file was handed to Brigadier Vowles, the Brigadier Advisory, who disagreed with the decision. On 4 March, he minuted a proposal to amend Queen's Regulations to make it more difficult for a commanding officer to dismiss charges in future.
	On 24 March, the Adjutant-General wrote to CGS and CIC Land, copying his letter to the Brigadier, to inform them that he intended to write to the Director of Army Legal Services to ask him to draw the case to the attention of the Attorney-General for the purpose of having resort to the jurisdiction. In that letter, the reason given was:
	"With current legal, political and ginger group interest in the deaths of Iraqi civilians during operation telic: our investigation and subsequent failure to offer for prosecution could become a cause celebre for pressure groups, and a significant threat to the military justice system".
	Such extraneous reasoning has nothing to do with the merits of the case and bore no kinship with the due administration of justice; and no suggestion was made at any time either before or after trial that the decisions of the commanding officers were irrational, perverse or incompatible with or contrary to the ECHR.
	Was that to have been a show trial on that reason? On 31 March—

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, may I respectfully remind the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, that this is a timed debate? Perhaps he could draw his remarks to a close.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I am allowed—

Noble Lords: Twelve minutes.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: May I claim one minute to deal with the letter? I was given 15 minutes.

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord if there has been some discrepancy, but on all our speakers' lists it states 12 minutes.

Viscount Slim: My Lords, may I say that I was amazed that the speakers' list was not available until six and a half minutes before the House sat? I had to go in person to get my copy from the Whips Office. We were all informed verbally beforehand that in introducing the debate the noble Lord would have 15 minutes. With all the IT and the bits we have, that is a poor show.

Baroness Crawley: My Lords, can I say to the noble Viscount, Lord Slim, that because it is a timed debate, obviously the more speakers we have the less time everyone has for their contribution?

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, can I ask the House's permission to finish reading what is relevant to the other letter—one minute?

Noble Lords: Agreed.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I am obliged.
	On 31 March, the DALS wrote to the Attorney-General requesting in that letter a reference on whether to institute proceedings for murder or manslaughter. In that letter no reference whatever was made to the extraneous reason. All that there was was a series of prejudicial allegations of no evidential value as already found by two commanding officers and by the trial judge.
	I am making no suggestion that the Attorney-General was ever aware of the true reason why they sought his concurrent jurisdiction. I am obliged to the House. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord Hoyle: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to and thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for raising the matter and allowing me to participate in the debate. It enables me to bring to the House the case of Colonel Jorge Mendonca, who is the colonel of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. At once, I must declare an interest in the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Ever since I entered Parliament in 1974, I have been a friend of and taken a keen interest in the regiment. In Warrington, there is a regimental Sunday attended by civic heads, from Manchester in the south and Lancaster in the north to Blackpool in the west and Pendle in the east. I point that out only because it shows the deep feeling towards the regiment in the whole north-west.
	The matter concerns the unfortunate and untimely death of Baha Musa in custody in Iraq. That is appalling, and I make no excuse whatever for it. Those responsible must be brought to justice. However, the Queen's Lancashire Regiment previously served in Basra with distinction and courage; it was mentioned in dispatches. For the first time for 40 years, a warrant officer received the Military Cross. Colonel Mendonca not only received the DSO but was made a full colonel.
	It is against that background that I want to examine the case. What is now hanging over him and other soldiers is that the case may be referred to the International Criminal Court. That court was not set up for that purpose. It was set up to deal with cases of genocide and with war criminals. That that gallant officer could be in the same dock as that in which Milosevic has appeared must be wrong in itself.
	As far as I understand it, the case against him is that he committed a war crime under the rules of the International Criminal Court, in that he failed to prevent soldiers under his command committing a war crime by assaulting Iraqi detainees on 13 September. On 13 September, the colonel was at least 13 miles away and was being shot at. Under Section 65(2) of the International Criminal Court Act 2001,
	"A military commander . . . is responsible for . . . forces under his effective command and control or . . . his effective authority and control".
	That is extremely wide-ranging. It is a catch-all. Why should it end with the colonel? Why not with the brigadier? Why not with the commander-in-chief in Iraq? Why not with the chief of staff? Why not with the Minister, the Secretary of State or, if we carry on that line, the Prime Minister? That is very wide-ranging, and I express caution about it.
	Replying in the other place, a Defence Minister, my honourable friend Don Touhig, said about the International Criminal Court that it,
	"will be able to take jurisdiction over an offence committed in the UK or by a UK citizen only if the domestic authorities are unable or unwilling to investigate or prosecute the case".—[Official Report, Commons, 14/6/05; col. 237.]
	That is what we are considering this morning and what I want to raise with my noble friend. If there is a case, surely we have the civil and military law on which it could be tried.
	I know that my noble friend is modest, but he has already gained a reputation as a person who takes decisions and is prepared to cut through red tape. I ask him to consider the matter. I know that the decision will not rest with him; the legal officers will take that decision. If they charge the colonel or other soldiers under the International Criminal Court, they will destroy the morale of all the soldiers, not just the Queen's Lancashire Regiment but soldiers serving in Iraq, Afghanistan or any other theatre of war.
	I ask that common sense prevail in this matter. Indeed, I ask my noble friend to lift the cloud that is hanging over the head of that brave and gallant officer and that historic and well respected regiment, the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. I hope that we can get that decision from him today.

Lord Craig of Radley: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for introducing this important debate. I wish to address a wider point covered by his Motion, leaving other noble Lords to concentrate on the more immediate concerns of us all.
	The 1998 Strategic Defence Review acknowledged that the system of service law was essential to operational effectiveness, its fundamental purpose being to foster and promote the discipline and self-control required in an effective fighting force. The right to command—and respect for command—in upholding that discipline are thus of great importance. They are the two sides of the same coin.
	Right to command is underwritten by statute. The Armed Forces discipline Acts state, for example, that it is an offence to disobey a lawful command. A commander at every level expects obedience, and a positive reaction from the subordinate, to his or her lawful order or instruction.
	While the right to command is underwritten in statute, the flip side of the coin—respect for command—relies on a very different approach. Indeed, if the command is to be respected, it is self-evident that the giver of that command must himself be respected. Without that, the commanded will not respond, as they must, without hesitation. It is the interaction between the two—the commanded and the commander—that must be build upon to achieve the cohesion and professional competence required for modern warfare and peace-keeping.
	For centuries it was ordered, again in statute, that all commanders had disciplinary powers; this aligning of command with discipline being essential to operational effectiveness. If a subordinate transgressed, he or she could be dealt with at the level of command appropriate to the alleged offence: minor misdemeanours at a junior level; the more serious crimes by court martial, ordered usually by a two-star officer in the chain of command. Outcomes were also formally reviewed by the chain of command.
	The introduction of the Human Rights Act in 1998, and the renewed obligation for the Armed Forces to abide in particular by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, have accelerated changes in service disciplinary procedures. Courts martial, for example, are no longer convened by the chain of command. The use of uniformed judge advocates in Royal Navy courts martial has ended. For the human rights advocate this more correctly accords with the independent and impartial tribunal of Article 6.
	But—a very big "but" in my mind—there is a growing risk that because senior commanders no longer convene courts martial nor review findings, and junior commanders have had their disciplinary powers circumscribed, these commanders must appear to some to be no longer trusted to act impartially. It is not a very big step to thinking that if authority—in the shape of Parliament—appears not to trust commanders to administer discipline fairly, doubts could surface in different fields about a commander's competence, not only in the field of discipline. Each step taken to alter the long-standing Armed Forces disciplinary procedures may erode confidence in, and hence respect for, commanders at every level.
	The Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces have taken numerous steps to respond to the perceived needs of the Human Rights Act and the convention. They have worked hard to adjust their procedures to fit this new regime.
	I should have liked a more robust resistance by governments to the changes that have been accepted—changes that may have an insidious impact on the effectiveness and well-being of the Armed Forces. The disciplinary responsibilities of the chain of command have been weakened.
	When the Human Rights Act was in your Lordships' House I tried to get some relief for the Armed Forces, and supported an amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway on Report. On a comparable amendment on Third Reading, I said that,
	"we are in danger of allowing it"—
	the Bill—
	"to undermine the essential ethos, military discipline and responsibility of commanding officers within our Armed Forces".—[Official Report, 5/2/98; col. 762.]

[The House observed a two-minute silence.]
	In responding to the debate, the then Lord Chancellor said:
	"I urge your Lordships to be of the view that the convention is a flexible instrument. It poses no threat to the effectiveness of the Armed Forces".—[Official Report, 5/2/98; col. 768.]
	Practical experience since then does not support that assertion. Flexibility there has not been. The effectiveness of the Armed Forces disciplinary and command structures is being affected. It is a slow-burning fuse. We must beware lest it sparks an explosion of insubordination.
	The House will have the opportunity to consider these complex issues when it debates the new Armed Forces Bill during this Session. Perhaps the flexibility of human rights legislation, avowed so earnestly by the then Lord Chancellor, will be revealed for the benefit of the Armed Forces of the Crown. I hope so, but your Lordships should not hold your breath.

Lord Bramall: My Lords, I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for the debate, raising as it does the important issues of authority of the military chain of command and the impact that civil law, much of which emanates from Europe and the International Court at The Hague, may have on the way in which soldiers perform their duty and take risks on the battlefield.
	There is considerable disquiet among some members of the forces and concern that, even when doing their perceived duty in an operational situation, they may become vulnerable to prosecution and will not always be backed up higher up the chain of command, where it may be claimed that the matter has been taken out of their hands. Without assurances of mutual confidence and responsibility, you cannot run effective fighting forces with the commitment, morale and readiness to take the risks needed to defeat a ruthless and determined enemy.
	It is not just the existence of the new legal code—perhaps now weighted as much, if not more, on human rights as on self-defence—that is potentially not conducive to the mutual concern and responsibility of seniors for juniors on which a proper military system operates; it is also the way in which the law can be interpreted by investigators—military and civil; legal advisers, who are often far removed from the scene of the action; and even in the somewhat highly charged political climate of today and the International Criminal Court Act, by the chain of command itself, with superiors becoming as much concerned with avoiding responsibility and consequent prosecution as they are with justice for the individual under investigation.
	That was highlighted, as noble Lords have heard, in the recent, lamentable case of Trooper Williams of the Royal Tank Regiment. The Ministry of Defence, influenced by contradictory legal advice far removed from the battlefield; by those extraneous features quoted exactly by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway; and by the power of pressure groups actively encouraged, through the head of the Army Legal Services, the Attorney-General to intervene and—needlessly, as it turned out—to arraign the soldier on a charge of murder at the Old Bailey. That was after the soldier had already been properly investigated by the commanding officer who, on proper legal advice and in touch with the situation and circumstances, had dismissed any case against Williams on the ground that there was no case to answer.
	The case at the Old Bailey subsequently collapsed when, at the eleventh hour, the Director of Public Prosecutions, realising that the charges would not stick, did not offer any evidence against the soldier. That was only after the soldier and his unit had gone through the most appalling anguish and ripples of concern had gone throughout the Army. The soldier and his regiment behaved in an exemplary manner. I doubt whether the same could be said of the Ministry of Defence.
	I am not talking about ill treatment or abuse by soldiers when handling prisoners of war outside an operational environment. That is covered by the Geneva Convention on which, in a situation as legally and operationally confused as Iraq, soldiers should be properly briefed. The responsibility for that briefing lies as much with those at the top who sent the soldiers into such a confusing situation as it does with some convenient scapegoat in the chain of command. That is a different issue. I am talking particularly about ongoing operations in Iraq, in which there is no distinction between war zones and civilian areas and little distinction between terrorists and law-abiding civilians.
	In those circumstances, if there is evidence of hostile elements and hostile intent in the area, the soldier often has to decide instantly whether, to safeguard his life and the lives of his comrades, he needs to open fire or can safely show more restraint. That judgment can only be taken on the spot by soldiers relying on their professional judgment and sometimes on the innate decency of the British soldier. It should only be reviewed, justified or condemned, if further investigation becomes necessary, by those familiar with similar situations and aware of the environment and the pressures prevailing at the time and able to make a judgment on whether the soldier has acted in good faith and therefore deserves the benefit of any doubt that there may be.
	Rules of engagement and yellow cards help, but the troubling thing about the case of Trooper Williams, who had shot an Iraqi who was clearly connected with terrorism and who had ignored a warning shot, was that commanding officer had dismissed the case just because he was satisfied that the rules of engagement had been met. That still did not stop interference with the chain of command at a level remote from the action and by those influenced by political pressures and adverse publicity.
	There are a great many cases pending; it is to be hoped that the Williams fiasco will not be repeated and that soldiers doing their duty in good faith will be given the proper support that they deserve. If investigations are needed, they should be dealt with either summarily or by court martial by people who understand the situation on the ground and pressures of the battle situation.
	I am not suggesting that the military should ever consider itself above the law. I ask only that, in an operational situation of limited war or counter-insurgency, the law should be interpreted not in some sort of legal vacuum but with close regard to the realities on the ground. The new international legal code was always likely to impinge on military duty, which is why, in your Lordships' House and in another place, so many of us pleaded for some partial opt-out, as obtained by the Americans and the French. That was flatly rejected by the Government, and we are now starting to see the consequences of that rejection.

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde: My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for initiating this debate, although I feel that none of us would prefer to be in this position of discussing an issue that, frankly, should never have arisen in the first place. I have some sympathy for my noble friend the Minister who is to answer the debate, because some of the responsibilities in the Trooper Williams case, which has become the cordon around which we have all drawn, are not totally political. There are many answers to come from the MoD itself.
	I am pleased that the debate has drawn my noble friend Lord Moonie to make his maiden speech. He had a period at the Ministry of Defence, probably when the International Criminal Court and the Human Rights Act were being debated. I look forward to his contribution and I am delighted that he has joined us in this House.
	Last week we were all expressing our support for our emergency services, and rightly so. The threats that those people bravely faced last Thursday are the kind of threats that the young men and women in our Armed Forces face day in and day out when they are on operations. They are in an entirely different situation from the sort that any of us in this Chamber, or anywhere else in civil life, face from day to day. They are well trained and professional. I had the privilege of seeing them in operation in different parts of the world when I was chairman of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body. I was always impressed by their commitment.
	Things do go wrong, however. Wrong decisions and actions sometimes take place. When that happens, I do not think anyone in this Chamber would say that a duly diligent investigation and discipline are not required. That has to take place. However, I am concerned about the element of double jeopardy, which emerged strongly in the case of Trooper Williams. My concern is about the way in which the case appears to have been handled. A decision was taken to hand it to the Attorney-General. That was, frankly, irresponsible. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, said, it was totally remote from the realities of the situation and the report submitted by the officers in the field in command of Trooper Williams.
	That is just picking up one case. My noble friend Lord Hoyle rightly identified another case in the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. As a Lancastrian, I too am concerned about that. The concern has to be not in highlighting two cases—one real and one potential—and perhaps others; it has to be in getting this situation right. If we ask people, as part of their compact, to defend our country, to go out and project the policy in the field of operation, we have a responsibility to them. They have a responsibility to follow the regulations. The commanding officer in the Trooper Williams case said that he did. We have a responsibility to answer that.
	The ramifications of this case go right the way through the Armed Forces. The young man and woman joining the forces need to know, when they are sent out on an operation, that they have the leadership behind them and that leadership will be demonstrated in a responsible way. In these cases, their judgment was reasonable, as they were dealing with people who were up to no good and may have threatened their lives.
	I do not know what went wrong in the MoD. I rather suspect that at the moment it is a case of passing the parcel. My goodness, it went very badly wrong. We should be aware of why those decisions were taken. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, has identified that. But I wonder whether the case would have reached the notice of this House if Trooper Williams had not had the support of his own regiment, other people in the services and outside.
	I know that there are concerns about the International Criminal Court and the European Convention on Human Rights. Perhaps we need to review that. I know that we need some answers. We must carry through our commitment, our part of that compact with the Armed Forces. We need to ensure that they feel safe in their regulation and leadership. If they take a wrong decision or break the regulations—none of us knows how we would react if faced with the situation that Trooper Williams faced—if their errors were genuine and they had tried to keep and did keep within the regulations, they need to know that they will not then face what I call the double jeopardy of a charge of murder. The Trooper Williams case took two years, and I can just imagine the feelings in his home. I cannot think of many people who would have carried it with the dignity shown by Trooper Williams.
	Later this year the Armed Forces (Parliamentary Approval for Participation in Armed Conflict) Bill will be debated in the other place. Eventually it will come here. These cases highlight the need to pay great attention to detail when we come to discuss the Bill. When my noble friend the Minister comes to reply, will he help us, first, by indicating that these experiences will be taken into account when the Bill comes before us and, secondly, by assuring us that the Government will have a listening ear when we raise the issues that come out of decisions in a court where they should never have appeared?

Lord Vincent of Coleshill: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for initiating the debate on the interpretation of military law and its application to members of the Armed Forces, particularly in the case of those who have been committed to military operations.
	Let me make it clear at the outset that I accept fully the need for members of the Armed Forces to be accountable for their actions undertaken within a relevant legal framework, including the specific rules of engagement that are applicable in each operation. But it is equally important that those who define and apply such legally binding criteria do so in a form that is compatible with the nature of the operations our Armed Forces have been directed to undertake.
	Those who have formal responsibility for investigating and dealing with possible cases of misconduct on military operations also need to take account of their unique and changing characteristics. Military operations have no equivalent in any other context that I can think of, whereby members of our Armed Forces are required to go when and where they are directed and, if needed, to put themselves in harm's way, often repeatedly in unforeseen and highly confusing operational environments.
	I referred to "the changing characteristics" of such operations for reasons that have become increasingly clear in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, our Armed Forces are not operating in environments only where there has been no declaration of war or where their adversaries wear no uniform, they also have to respond to terrorists who seek to conceal themselves as members of the population at large whom our Armed Forces are there to help and to protect.
	Furthermore, such adversaries have no commitment whatever to international agreements, such as the Geneva Conventions or the Human Rights Act. It is often a deliberate part of terrorist operations that they seek to exploit such legislation to their own advantage by ignoring it themselves while our Armed Forces are bound by it and accountable to it.
	To cope with these complexities, our Armed Forces today, for most such operations, are issued with rules of engagement to provide direction on the degree of force that may be justified, including lethal force, under a wide range of operational circumstances. The potential difficulty is that the rules of engagement themselves can make it very difficult when critical decisions have to be taken—literally in seconds and often by junior ranks faced with life-or-death circumstances—to determine what degree of force can legitimately be used. This can often take place, as Trooper Williams experienced so clearly and dramatically, when your adversary has no such constraints on his actions whatever.
	In a broader context, this more complex and demanding environment in which members of our Armed Forces now have to conduct themselves on operations is in sharp contrast to the experience and expectations of our society at large which increasingly expects to be protected by such legislation as the Human Rights Act and Health and Safety at Work Act. And since the phasing out of national service in the early 1960s, together with the substantial reductions in our Armed Forces since the ending of the Cold War, an ever-decreasing proportion of our adult population, including Members of Parliament, the government and the legal profession, have any first-hand experience of military operations at all.
	In one sense, that is greatly to be welcomed, because since 1945, our security and defence policies have generally proved so effective, despite the periodic alarms and excursions, that, for the population at large, we have overall enjoyed in this country the longest period of peace and growing prosperity in modern history. But one practical difficulty arising from this remarkable and welcome outcome is that there are ever-fewer people who can make genuinely well informed judgments based on hard-won military experience on active service about the justification or otherwise for the conduct of military operations by our Armed Forces, both collectively and individually. Clearly, in the case of Trooper Williams, this judgment went seriously awry until, after many months, the charge against him for murder was eventually dismissed with no case to answer. We need to learn the lessons that arise from that case, taking also into account the broader developments in society at large to which I have referred.
	It is against that background that I read with interest the brief article by the Secretary of State for Defence in the House Magazine on 13 June, written shortly after his appointment. He said:
	"What will the world look like in the years ahead, and how shall we change to meet the threats it will pose in defence of our rights and in the discharge of our global responsibilities? First, our security will be best served by going to meet the threats of the future, rather than waiting for them to come to us, as we once did. Second, those threats are likely to emerge in places which perhaps didn't show up on our radar screens a few years ago. They will be disparate, well-hidden and will be happy to use innocent civilians as cover, be it politically or physically. This is why we are building quickly deployable forces, embracing new technologies to ensure that we can best take advantage of our fleeting chances to strike at this new enemy".
	If the members of our Armed Forces, who repeatedly put their lives on the line in such operations, are to be expected to,
	"take their fleeting chances to strike at this new enemy",
	they need to be empowered legally and relevantly to do so and, subsequently, to be judged on a realistic knowledge and awareness of the uniquely hazardous and uncertain environments to which, without any choice, they are committed. My question to Her Majesty's Government is: how is that to be achieved?

Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I wish to speak in the context of the present debate on the duty of care as it affects the relationship between the Government—the MoD—and our Armed Forces. Sir Michael Rose once said:
	"Soldiers are not merely civilians in uniform. They form the distinctive group within our society which is required either to kill other human beings or expressly to sacrifice themselves for the nation".
	They should not suffer because of our failure to seek a derogation or even a reservation when signing the Act.
	As Lord Carver said at the time,
	"In practical terms it would not be possible under severe active service conditions to apply most of the provisions of the Act",
	and that is precisely when soldiers need and are entitled to be tried—if tried they have to be—within the service under well-tried military procedures and according to the rules of engagement.
	The duty of care extends to ensuring that the forces are not put under unnecessary strain, a strain that is very likely to arise in a continuing campaign such as Iraq, where peace is not peace and war is not war and the enemy is very difficult to identify, and where it is even more vital for the morale of the troops that they know exactly what the rules are and how they are protected. In future capabilities, the committee in the other place concluded that many frontline units in the Army have for some years been experiencing an operational and training cycle whose intensity is unsustainable in the longer term and that the Strategic Defence Review had provided relatively little resilience. Good morale has therefore a practical necessity.
	The committee thought that if the Army has only just enough personnel to man the proposed force structure, a lack of resilience could be expected in the future. But meanwhile the Government are taking on more and more tasks. The present emphasis on expeditionary operations may not be taking sufficient account of whether there are actually enough boots on the ground. Increasingly, the Armed Forces are being committed to EU and UN plans for battle groups, the initial operational capability, support for an AU force, including possible action in Africa, and filling the large shortfall in the European capability. Little or none of that was foreseen in the Strategic Defence Review, and neither the EU nor the UN are capable of managing all those forces.
	Meanwhile, the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit has produced a massive, glossy, 161-page tome, Investing in Prevention: An International Strategy to Manage Risks of Instability and Improve Crisis Response. Why that was necessary as well as the Global Conflict Prevention Pool in which the MoD, FCO and DfID work together is far from clear. The MoD's strategy Delivering Security in a Changing World already envisages that the UK will be regularly engaged in stabilisation and post-conflict efforts, with all their special problems—for the foreseeable future. The only thing for which HMG evidently has no plans is where to find the available resources.
	Due care should include not only the safety and reassurance of judgments within the military system; it should consider morale in other areas. That includes the anxiety which will be suffered by families and the doubts of potential recruits.
	I am baffled by the immense tome from the Strategy Unit compiled by 28 policy analysts, of whom only three were from the MoD, and a red team of five, of whom one was—surprise, surprise—a partner in McKinsey's. It is full of diagrams, tables, recommendations on everything from supporting NEPAD and the EU to an incentive to capacity matrix, figures, boxes, tables, strategies and basic instability frameworks. I should not be surprised if the cost of this tome in terms of staff and production would not go quite a long way to improving service housing.
	The Government are failing in a duty of care, both in legal and in moral terms. Co-ordinating war-making and the subsequent peace-building is sensible, but not confusing and diluting the role of the Armed Forces in an attempt to treat them as if they were civilians, just like you and me. They are not, any more than DfID is composed of diplomats or soldiers.
	The MoD is not there to operate, as it seems it did, on the basis of political correctness. That is the last thing that should concern it. For our part, we have a simple duty and noble and gallant Lords are certainly fulfilling that today. We must demand that the Government protect the troops as they protect us and allow those troops the safety and reassurance to which they have a right.

Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank: My Lords, in no way should my words be construed that murder or criminality, including prisoner abuse, be tolerated. Our service men and women must operate within the rule of law, wrong-doers must be sought out and punished, and, of course, necessary investigations into serious allegations must take place.
	But if we have to commit our forces to situations such as pertain in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should recognise what we are asking them to do and just how hostile, frightening and stressful the environment is in which they must operate. They are often in mortal danger and tired. They are expected always to make considered decisions and take correct actions when the situation in which they find themselves is far from clear and their own and others' lives are threatened. That would be extremely challenging for anybody, but we are asking a great deal of young soldiers who are put under huge pressure. That pressure has been experienced by few people outside the services and rarely by those who craft our laws and are responsible for our legal system. Difficulties are compounded in theatres such as Iraq when the rules of engagement designed for a war are suddenly changed to those required for internal security.
	This debate is so important—I wish it could have taken place many months ago—because undeniable damage to the Army's trust in the chain of command has occurred and it could have been minimised. The risk of morale suffering further is real. Many people, I am afraid—rightly or wrongly—think that the system is unjust. We also run a risk of making our services risk averse, which would have serious implications for operations.
	It is no good for the Ministry of Defence to claim that it does all it can to help soldiers. The perception of many soldiers is that the very minimum is done. Indeed, the defence team in the sorry affair of Trooper Williams, including both the civilian barrister and solicitor, said that they had no positive assistance from the Ministry of Defence at any stage. As we have heard, fortunately Trooper Williams had support, as one would expect, from his own regiment, his commanding officer and his immediate chain of command. He had a champion in a retired general, Sir Antony Walker. His own regiment raised a fighting fund of some £68,000, subscribed to by nearly 3,000 people who had heard or read of Trooper Williams's plight.
	The overwhelming majority of service men and women are thoroughly decent young people who are caught up in conflict. They act in good faith, but sometimes unwisely. Of course, as I said, some investigations are necessary but many, I suspect, have more to do with political correctness, the culture of "somebody must be blamed" and fear of compensation demands. They may be done to pacify the ill- intentioned or as a defence against civilian solicitors from the United Kingdom who are touting for business on the back streets of Basra.
	The Special Investigations Branch has a huge responsibility to carry out investigations objectively. One very experienced and well respected operational commander told me recently that his soldiers were of the firm opinion that the Special Investigations Branch had become more interested in achieving prosecutions than searching for the truth. Experienced civilian lawyers have also said how shocked they have been by the attitude of the Special Investigations Branch to the soldiers they have been representing. This is enormously damaging to confidence and trust.
	I ask the Minister to answer two questions that he has already been posed. First, when I was Chief of the Defence Staff, I was assured that it was unthinkable for British service men and women to be sent to the International Criminal Court. Can the Minister assure the House that that is still so?
	Secondly, can the Government give serious consideration to the British Armed Forces, like the French forces, opting out of their commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights? Many of us feel that we should, in view of our experiences in Iraq.
	Lastly, I feel uncomfortable about the situation in which we find ourselves. We went to war in Iraq—quite rightly, in my view—and committed our service men and women to perhaps the most difficult and dangerous operations that our forces have faced for many years. They deserve our full, unequivocal backing. I wish I could say that, so far as concerns our debate today, I thought they had it. I implore Ministers—particularly the new Secretary of State, who is much respected in the defence community—to examine what can be done to restore confidence and not to rely solely on advice from the legal services in the Ministry of Defence and their normal MoD briefers. They should hear, in addition, from the officers and soldiers, who have been investigated and who fought in Iraq, and their commanders—those who have been on the receiving end and feel, like Colonel Collins, that they have been "hung out to dry".
	There is now a feeling that the Ministry of Defence, at the highest level, does not recognise that we have a problem. Does the Minister? Today, I am afraid that we should feel ashamed.

Lord Boyce: My Lords, I wish to focus on the vital linkage between the chain of command and the summary discipline system. Command and discipline in the Armed Forces go absolutely hand in hand. A commanding officer, who has total responsibility for the command of his ship or unit, must, in turn, be responsible for—and carry out—its discipline. It is impossible to achieve and maintain the necessary level of discipline unless those under his or her command are in absolutely no doubt that their commanding officer has authority over them.
	It is discipline that ultimately underpins the way individuals respond to command. This necessary responsiveness and willingness, inculcated in everyone because they know exactly where they stand, has long been recognised in the British Armed Forces as essential to the maintenance of operational capability and the ability to win—even when against the odds. Our history is littered with relevant examples.
	That is why it is not just right, but essential, that the commanding officer himself should exercise disciplinary powers over those in his command. He is best placed to understand the circumstances of service life and of his particular unit—and the causes and significance of misconduct by those under his command. Parliament has legislated upon this very basis by providing a system of summary jurisdiction based around the commanding officer. This summary system of justice applies both within the United Kingdom and abroad—with the vital principle that it is consistent in application and that the individual soldier, sailor or airman is subject at all times to the same rights, powers, procedures and penalties under that system.
	While there may be purist legal arguments for ensuring that those who decide guilt and punish offenders are independent of the person accused, we interfere with the unique linkage between the commanding officer and his men at our peril.
	It is the commanding officer who will know best the importance of enforcing discipline by punishing misconduct expeditiously, with the whole unit being aware that justice has been done, and been seen to be done. The need for prompt action is true of any disciplinary system—but on operations it can be even more vital to deal swiftly with misconduct. The importance of having effective means for the commanding officer to deal with misconduct in deployed ships and submarines—as I know well from my experience—or indeed in any deployed unit, from whatever service, is vital to maintaining morale.
	The commanding officer's summary powers enable straightforward dealing with offences—face to face between the member of the unit and the commanding officer—and are based on trust, authority and impartiality. I am absolutely certain that they play a vital part in underpinning our Armed Forces remaining world class, capable of operations across the full spectrum from diplomacy to direct action. Incidentally, I would contend that they are also why our Armed Forces have high morale and relatively low levels of criminality.
	Of course there must be safeguards; but we see far too many examples of Ministers being tempted to deal with concerns in an organisation by bolting on some sort of independent oversight or adjudication. If we continue travelling down this road, there will come a point where the close relationship between a commanding officer and his or her people will be lost—and if that is destroyed, the consequences will be serious.
	I am afraid that the summary system itself is under such sort of attack, and even if the Baines case currently before the courts goes in the Armed Forces' favour, I have no doubt that there will be similar raids on it in the future, and then that the MoD will follow habit and cave in to ginger group pressure. Will the Minister confirm unequivocally that the Government still believe there is a vital need for commanding officers to be able to exercise disciplinary power over those under his or her command? And can he confirm that he is committed to the integrity of the chain of command free of outside interference?
	I turn to the issue of the individual liability of commanding officers for their actions, where it is very easy to underestimate the effect of threats of legal challenge on commanding officers. Naturally, we expect them to behave lawfully, but there are those without relevant responsibility who seem all too ready to challenge the actions of particular commanding officers. It is expecting a great deal of the individual that he or she puts out of their mind such considerations on the eve of battle. It is a fact that commanding officers do perceive that they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to legal challenge for their actions. I believe that we are going to see that generating real risk-averseness, clouding good military judgment.
	In this context I would mention the threat of being taken before the International Criminal Court. While I accept that it will be an extreme that sees the ICC gaining jurisdiction, the theoretical possibility does exist. The Williams case—which I know is not an ICC issue—does not fill me with any confidence at all about the Government supporting their fighting men and women. I am also sure that we will see creeping jurisprudence of the sort that has afflicted the European Court of Human Rights—created post-war, quite rightly, to cater for the excesses of Nazism but now dealing with such weighty matters as school uniforms. Can the Minister confirm that the Government believe that their legislation must not make service men and women risk-averse through fears of personal liability? If he does so confirm, I have to tell him that the message is not getting to the front line.
	Your Lordships will not mind me, in this bicentennial year of the Battle of Trafalgar, recalling one of Nelson's famous command directives:
	"No captain can do wrong if he lays his ship alongside that of the enemy".
	The Armed Forces are under legal siege and are being pushed in a direction that will see such an order being deemed as improper or legally unsound. They are being pushed by people schooled not in operations but only in political correctness. They are being pushed to a time when they will fail in an operation because the commanding officer's authority and his command chain has been compromised with tortuous rules not relevant to fighting and where his instinct to be daring and innovative is being buried under the threat of liabilities and hounded out by those who have no concept of what is required to fight and win.

Lord Moonie: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, on succeeding in gaining a debate on this important subject. It is also a great pleasure to follow the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Boyce and Lord Guthrie, in speaking today in my maiden speech, as I worked with them for several years in the Ministry of Defence.
	Using the word "maiden" to describe an old political hack like me is perhaps stretching the point a bit, after the years I spent in another place. However, I should like to record my sincere gratitude to the staff of the House for the way in which they ease the passage of Members into it and the help that they give us. From my dim recollection of 18 years ago, it is quite different from the situation that applied then in the House of Commons. I am grateful for the welcome that I have received also from old friends, some of whom I have known for nearly 40 years. I look forward to spending time with them now in the House.
	I understand that a maiden speech should be short and non-controversial. I certainly do not mean to contravene such long practice. Should I stray beyond the bounds of accepted practice, I will be happy—I know it is not the done thing—to take interventions. I am blessed with a thick skin, as you can see, but, I regret to say, also with a fairly sharp tongue; so do it at your own risk.
	It is five and a half years since I first became a Minister in the Ministry of Defence, and almost my first duty was to take what is now the Armed Forces Discipline Act 2000 through its Committee stage in the Commons. I had long experience in opposition of taking Bills through, and as the Ministry of Defence is not noted for the number of Bills with which it has been landed in the course of its existence, other than the quinquennial review, they were glad to find someone who had more than a passing acquaintance with how Committees worked.
	The Act, of course, brought in a wide range of changes in the way in which members of the Armed Forces are disciplined, both in their unit and at court martial, consequential to the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law and to the results of one or two prior judgements from Europe that forced the changes on us. I fully supported the action that we took then, and I still do.
	Members of our Armed Forces enlist or are commissioned in the full knowledge that they may be called on to pay a very heavy price—sadly, sometimes, the ultimate price—for their service. Surely, they are therefore entitled to expect the same protection during legal process as any other British citizen, with the strong proviso—I agree with the previous speaker on this—that that should not be to the detriment of the operational effectiveness of their unit. That is the test that must be applied to the Act, now that we have seen it in operation for five years.
	At the time, Ministers including myself gave certain assurances to the effect that we would look closely at how the Act was operated. If the service chiefs and their predecessors feel that problems are arising as a result of the operation of the Act, it is high time that it was reviewed. Our Armed Forces, after all, are the best in the world, and we want them to remain so.
	That brings me to the second problem germane to the debate; namely, the perception that the setting up of the International Criminal Court and this Administration's support for it represent an intolerable burden for our Armed Forces. The example of Private Williams has rightly been cited, with the difference of opinion that arose about how that tragic accident should be dealt with between the chain of command and the legal department. Clearly, the course of action in any individual's case will vary depending on the danger of the situation and the rules of engagement in operation at the time. In particular, the taking of human life is something that requires a very full justification.
	One can argue for ever about whether the action taken in the case of Private Williams was correct or not. Perhaps I may put on record the fact that I was glad that the case did not proceed, although I regret the time that it took to come to that decision. In passing, I also think that it was unfortunate—I am no jurist—that the charge brought had to be murder. We have seen that before in situations involving soldiers who have discharged their weapons and killed someone, particularly in Northern Ireland. Surely, it would be preferable to have a greater range of options available, so that a charge could be brought and justice administered in a fashion appropriate to the offence that is said to have been committed. Having no option other than a charge of murder is a great failing in our legal system and one that should be remedied as soon as practicable.
	Nevertheless, in order for us to be sure that we comply with the law and avoid the chance of charges being brought in the ICC against British service men and women—I agree with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, that it is a theoretical possibility, but only a theoretical possibility—we have to ensure in this country that our legal proceedings do not render us liable to the proceedings of the court. We supported the court coming in; we can hardly cavil at the fact that a case could be referred to it. That cannot be allowed to happen, and we must ensure that it is not allowed to happen by ensuring that our legal procedures are correct. If that is the case, we have nothing to fear. I do not think that it is something that any of us would wish.
	Sadly, in a case such as Williams, there will be some doubt—but in very few cases. The Ministry of Defence has said that of 70,000 service men and women who have served in Iraq, nine case have been brought under civil law to date. That is a very small number, but it is an indication that we look very carefully at the disciplinary procedures that apply and step in only when we feel that it is absolutely necessary to do so. It is right, after all, that our people should be able to operate in life-threatening situations without constantly looking over their shoulder for approval from somebody. They must be able to do that, but it is surely equally correct that wrongdoing is properly dealt with and that justice is not only done but seen to be done.

Lord Mayhew of Twysden: My Lords, I am delighted to have the privilege of congratulating on behalf of all of us the noble Lord, Lord Moonie, on his maiden speech. He has brought great political and professional experience to his membership of this House, and I know that we all look forward to hearing him contribute on many further occasions. As an old political hack—to use his engagingly modest description of himself—I know that he will recognise why one would like to say very much more by way of welcome than a time-limited debate permits. But he is very welcome and I am delighted to have the privilege of congratulating him.
	At least two noble and gallant Lords have pointed out that service people on active service, including on dangerous operations, do not expect or require to be exempt from the rule of law. I know that to be true but I know something else as well, that they expect and need to be treated by the enforcers of the rule of law with realism and fairness.
	Having listened to the speech of my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway, whom I too thank for this debate, it is perfectly clear to me that the overriding question in the case of Trooper Williams lies in the reasons that led the Director of Army Legal Services to refer the case to the Attorney-General. It is particularly good that this debate has been afforded to us because it has already thrown much needed light upon that most disturbing case. More light is needed, and I hope that the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General will produce it, because it is too much to expect the Minister who is from a quite different department to provide it.
	Why is the Attorney-General not here? He played a crucial part in the reference of this case to the Crown Prosecution Service. He must have endorsed the Crown Prosecution Service's subsequent decision to recharge Trooper Williams in the civilian jurisdiction. Much as I admire and like the noble and learned Lord, I find it astonishing that he is not here today.
	Your Lordships will recall what my noble friend Lord Campbell said about the letter sent by the Adjutant-General to the Chief of the General Staff explaining why, in the Adjutant-General's view, it was necessary to invite the Attorney-General to review the case. It is quite extraordinary that that letter cited reasons which—as the House will recall from what my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway said—were quite extraneous, to use his words, to any proper decision as to whether someone should be prosecuted for any offence, let alone for murder. They included the pressure of ginger groups arising out of the deaths of civilians in Operation TELIC in Iraq and concerns for the future of the military justice system if a cause célèbre were to grow up among pressure groups. These are, as accurately as I can recall them, direct quotations from that letter.
	It is a very serious situation indeed that that action was taken in circumstances which ran against what was the clear policy and scheme of the Army Act, because your Lordships will recall that before this occurred the commanding officer—acting upon strong advice from Colonel Barnett of the Army Legal Services, which was itself endorsed by his superior in Iraq, who I believe was called Colonel McElvoy—had dismissed the charge of murder on grounds that there was insufficient evidence. Although the decision in military law rested with him, what alternative, effectively, could possibly have presented itself to him? So far as I know nobody has criticised him.
	It therefore becomes necessary to see what led the Director of Army Legal Services to circumvent the policy of the Act, which provides that once a case of that kind has been dismissed it cannot be taken to a higher military authority and tried by court martial. Well, we read the letter that was sent. It is very important to realise—and we get it from a paper put by the Attorney-General in the Library of the House in 2004—that the Director of Army Legal Services is also the Army Prosecuting Authority, and that he is required to be independent of the chain of command. The Attorney-General said in a Written Statement to this House that the matter was referred to the Attorney-General on behalf of the Adjutant-General. How could the Army Prosecuting Authority—the Director of Army Legal Services—have been acting independently of the chain of command if he acceded to a request and acted on behalf of the Adjutant-General? That is a most serious question that needs to be answered. I am very much afraid that he referred the matter because he was asked, and indeed told, to do so from on high.
	Very important questions have been raised and in a short time one cannot begin to do justice to them, but I do have to point with great regret to the fact that there is surely a reasonable perception that there was somewhere an unhealthy determination that Trooper Williams was going to be made to face this charge. I share the great relief expressed by the previous speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Moonie, and by others, that at the end of a very long day he was acquitted because the Crown Prosecution Service threw the towel in for lack of evidence.

Lord Inge: My Lords, like other noble Lords I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for initiating this very important debate. It is an enormously important issue, because if the integrity and authority of the Armed Forces' chain of command is undermined it will have serious implications on morale and the fighting effectiveness of our Armed Forces.
	A robust and, I stress, trusted chain of command is much more than a system for passing information and orders. Nor is it about discipline and punishment. Very importantly, it is about confidence and trust in the chain of command from the very bottom to the very top. Military command is very personal and very different to civilian life, not least because a military commander may have to lead men and women on operations where their lives may be in great danger.
	The whole chain of command has a duty for its servicemen and servicewomen and must do its best to ensure that it balances the care with the rights and interests of the civilian population and the law. Troops are assured by their officers that if they act in good faith and obey the rules of engagement they will be supported.
	At the same time a commanding officer and the chain of command have significant powers of punishment, but I must stress that it is not fear of punishment that makes our servicemen behave honourably in battle. The fact that our servicemen have such a high reputation is due to training, to pride in their unit, self-respect and, very importantly, their commanders—that is, the chain of command. But I am left with an uneasy feeling that that trust is being eroded.
	In the case of Trooper Williams the public and many in the Army gained the very clear impression that it needed a team led by General Sir Anthony Walker—a retired general in Trooper Williams's regiment—to make sure that Williams was being properly cared for and looked after. I know less about the Colonel Collins case, but his book makes it very clear that he felt that he had been deserted by the chain of command.
	My concern is compounded by the fact that 176 cases have been or are being investigated, and those include what I would call normal military fire-fights against the enemy in a war zone. The fact that the great majority of the cases have been dismissed is not the point, given that Iraq is a war zone. But the fact that those cases are being investigated sends a terrible message to the soldiers.
	I hope that military commanders throughout the chain of command are fully engaged, as well as the lawyers and civil servants who advise Ministers. That may sound unfair, but that perception is held by many. Let me make it absolutely clear that I am not saying that it is acceptable for prisoners to be appallingly treated or, even worse, for people to commit murder. I believe in the rule of law, but equally we have to recognise the realities of operational service in places such as Iraq.
	The situation in Iraq has been well described by General Lamb, a divisional commander there with considerable operational experience. He is certainly not prone to exaggeration. He described it as highly volatile, highly dangerous, and the worst situation that he had experienced. He confirmed the state of lawlessness and the huge pressure on his troops working in dreadful physical conditions, never knowing when in a moment an apparently benign situation would turn into a lethal attack. British soldiers have been killed and gravely injured. They faced mortar bombs, shelling, stoning, shooting and any kind of potentially lethal attack.
	Yesterday when I was in the Ministry of Defence, I was assured that a soldier would not have to appear before the International Criminal Court provided that the charge against him had been investigated by the military justice system, even if that charge had been dismissed. However, having heard some of the comments made today, especially those of the noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, I would like the Minister to confirm that what I was told in the Ministry of Defence yesterday is correct. Certainly, I would dread the day when a member of the British Armed Forces was tried by that court, because I believe passionately that if a soldier on operational service has broken the law, he should be tried by his own nation and not subject to the humiliation of going to the International Criminal Court.
	Like the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, I have heard the concerns from lawyers and some commanders about the questioning techniques used by the Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police. It is an organisation of which I once had the privilege of being the colonel commandant. They believe that technique to be unduly aggressive and biased, and that it appears to be based on the supposition that those whom the branch is investigating are guilty and that it is its duty to prove it.
	I seek assurance that the huge emotional and practical importance of the military chain of command, from the commanding officer right up to the Ministry of Defence and Ministers, is really understood. As I have said, my concern may be about perceptions, but I assure noble Lords that those perceptions exist. Therefore, the chain of command throughout its strength has to make it clear that a serviceman will be looked after by the chain of command, whatever his offence. It would be disastrous if servicemen lost faith in the chain of command, and there would be a danger that they might hesitate to use lethal force for fear of prosecution and their lives might be needlessly lost.
	In addition, it would be disastrous if we undermined the military justice system, which is a free-standing criminal justice system equal to that of a civil jury trial. If people such as Trooper Williams and others are to fight on the nation's behalf in areas as dangerous as Iraq, they are entitled to expect not only that the chain of command will keep its word, but that the Army and therefore the nation will support them provided that they act in good faith.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, like all those who have spoken before me, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for securing this important debate, in which I found myself nodding in agreement with so much of what has been said. I come at the case from the position of a former principal personnel officer, as Adjutant-General responsible for both disciplinary and legal matters in the Army.
	I begin with a cautionary tale, which echoes concerns referenced by my noble and gallant friends Lord Bramall and Lord Guthrie. One day, my opposite numbers in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force and I were told that, in future, we would have to include industrial tribunals in our service disciplinary chains. When we asked where that direction had come from, and whether they were to come before or after Her Majesty the Queen—who was the final point of appeal—we were told that such questions were irrelevant because the Bill making such a requirement law had emanated from Brussels, and had already had its First Reading in another place. France, Germany and other NATO allies had sought and been granted dispensation for their Armed Forces, but the United Kingdom had not.
	On seeing the Bill, the director of Army Legal Services told me that it was potentially disastrous for the Army's operational chain of command. It allowed employees to take their employers to industrial tribunal if ordered into a place of danger. Carried to logical, or illogical, conclusion, that meant that company commanders could take their commanding officers to industrial tribunal if ordered into an attack. What nonsense. No wonder our allies sought dispensation for their Armed Forces, as we subsequently did.
	I mention that to indicate why the Armed Forces become nervous whenever there is a suspicion that the integrity of their chain of command is under threat from people who do not understand the requirements of organisations that are required to operate in war as well as peace. That has been creeping up on us for some time.
	I should like to focus on the word "integrity", because it is at the heart of the case. Leadership is central to any operational organisation—especially the Armed Forces—that may be required to go to war. Central to the exercise of leadership is a chain of command, based on two key words—responsibility and accountability. Central to leadership itself is the word "trust". Every individual in the chain must have trust in its links, that they will get a fair deal from their commanders at all levels. Central to that trust is confidence in the integrity of Ministers, officials, commanders and staffs, which they have to earn.
	The chain is not merely a conduit for the passage of orders, but the means by which commanders exercise their levels of responsibility downwards and their accountability upwards. It links Ministers and chiefs of staff with individual soldiers, sailors and airmen, and is used for all purposes—operational, disciplinary, personnel management, logistics and so on. It is simple, clear and visible. It has stood the twin tests of time and war.
	Sadly, such clearly defined chains of command are becoming increasingly rare as Ministers and officials, lacking practical experience of either service in the Armed Forces or the exercise of operational leadership, are seduced by the cult of managerialism. A former Home Secretary claimed that while he was responsible for policy, he was not responsible for its operation. As commander of the brigade in Belfast, I could not have separated my responsibility and accountability for operations from policy.
	It is axiomatic that Armed Forces must act within the law, and it is the responsibility of commanders at all levels to ensure that they do so. That does not mean only the law of the land, but the law of armed conflict, service law and human rights legislation, subject of course to change. To ensure that that happens, chains of command must bear both operational and legal authority, with checks and balances to ensure that different levels are not abused.
	There has always been a difference between legal authority in peacetime and on active service. When in-between conditions applied in Northern Ireland, soldiers were helped to understand the rule of law by the issue of a yellow card that spelt out what could and could not be done. Unfortunately, the same practice has not been applied to post-Cold War situations such as those in Iraq, and our servicemen are now faced with an almost impossible situation. Allegedly they are not at war, despite constant attack, and yet the Prime Minister asserts that the nation is at war with both drugs and terrorism. Servicemen acting in bad faith should expect to be disciplined; servicemen acting in good faith should expect to be supported by the chain of command that put them in a position in which they had to act.
	What I find most uncomfortable about much of what has been said in this debate is that it discloses that all is not well with the trust that members of the Armed Forces, and particularly commanding officers, ought to have in the support that they will receive from their chain of command. I am disturbed to hear criticism of the lack of support for such as Trooper Williams from members of the Army Legal Services, who are there to help and not to hinder. As a former director of public relations for the Army, I am disturbed to learn that that post, responsible for both advising and protecting people, like him, who come into the public eye, has been dispensed with.
	The Government demand a great deal of our overstretched Armed Forces, setting them tasks that they continue to perform supremely well, to the envy of other nations. We owe it to them not to make those any more difficult. I hope that Ministers and officials will resist any temptation to interfere with the integrity of their chain of command, so central to their performance, whether by failing to seek dispensation from inappropriate legislation, or attempting to substitute managerialist techniques for the exercise of operational leadership.

Lord Tunnicliffe: My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, for introducing the debate. I rise with trepidation and contribute in awe of the noble and gallant Lords who have all spoken on a similar theme. I fear that my comments might be misinterpreted as lack of loyalty to the Armed Forces. I affirm my personal loyalty and commitment to and admiration of the work of the British Armed Forces, in the honest knowledge that, when I look into my own soul, I am not sure that I could meet the challenge that they meet daily.
	Nevertheless, the Armed Forces exist in the context of a modern, democratic nation. We have a duty to the Armed Forces to equip them, to train them, to develop them, to remunerate them and to care for them, and we have a responsibility to create the right legal framework. As a nation, we must also be accountable for our soldiers. Our great ally, the United States, has done immeasurable damage to its reputation by failing to manage one or two or perhaps a dozen or so individuals who have not been controlled properly and who have not been held accountable effectively by the system.
	If the nation is to be accountable for its soldiers, the Armed Forces must be accountable. At the end of the day, accountability is a process that holds individuals accountable. If we want to meet the standards of our nation, we must, inescapably, have a system of accountability for all members of the Armed Forces.
	The consensus is that the normal criminal law would be inadequate and that the circumstances in which people go to war are special. It is unusual in law to have such a special piece of law, but there is nothing between us in the need for that. Any system of law has, as part of its execution, proportionality, and, whether we like it or not, a death is a serious event. It is entirely reasonable that a process of law and of accountability will take a death seriously.
	I shall not review the Trooper Williams case—I do not know enough about it and I do not believe that I would add anything to the debate—but his principal punishment has been uncertainty. That uncertainty comes from ill administration in many areas: a series of individual decisions that, with the benefit of hindsight, appear unsatisfactory. He is not alone. Unfortunately, on many occasions, we do not provide timely and wise processes, particularly the CPS. I know of many people who suffer the punishment of uncertainty.
	Let us look forward and consider what is to be done. We must not take away the burden of accountability. It is crucial that our Armed Forces are accountable to a standard that commands the respect of the international community. That is one of the features that cause us to stand out as a nation. We must not do anything to take away that accountability. It is clear that the administration of justice by the agents of justice did not serve Trooper Williams, the Army or the reputation of the Army and our nation well. As individuals and as a government, we must constantly apply pressure for the agents of justice, within the military and without it, to be more efficient and to be more capable of timely and wise administration.
	What else can we do? Together, we can work on the new Armed Forces Bill, on the tri-service Act, or whatever it is to be called. That can take account of the many problems faced by the modern military. It can meet the essential elements of being fit for purpose, of securing appropriate accountability and of assuring the men and women of our Armed Forces that it is fair and timely. If we can improve the law and its administration, we can maintain and improve the morale of our excellent Armed Forces.

Lord Marlesford: My Lords, we all owe a debt of gratitude to my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway for the devastating indictment that he has put before the House. The Armed Forces are overstretched. The Government ask too much of what is available, but they perform magnificently. Therefore, if our forces do not feel that the Government are fully behind them in performing their duty, that would be the last straw. Political interference with the command and control of the British Army in the theatre of war, most especially with the internal disciplinary procedures, which are vital to the effectiveness of any fighting force, is fraught with danger.
	The morale of our troops at every level can be destroyed when they hear, for example, that their political masters have instructed the Special Investigations Branch to conduct investigations into every allegation of misconduct, however minor, and into every suggestion of misjudgement on the field of battle—and, "extraordinarily zealously". In such attitudes, there is a faint echo of Stalin's 1936 purge of the Soviet army. It meant that the professional military leadership had been removed by 1938, which nearly proved fatal in June 1941.
	Seldom can there have been such a dire warning in peace time as that being given to the Government today by the noble and gallant Lords who have served our country by leading our Armed Forces with such distinction over the decades, several of whom have been decorated for their courage and effectiveness in the face of the enemy. This year, there has been much recollection of the years leading up to the 1939 war and the warnings given then on the coming call to arms. Therefore, it is astonishing for governments to appear not to recognise that life for the Armed Forces on active service is quite different from normal civilian life. War is different from peace. The same standards do not apply and cannot be imposed.
	Many examples have been given of what has gone wrong. The story of Colonel Tim Collins, whose inspiring message to his troops on the eve of battle found a place on the desk of the Oval Office, is particularly lamentable. Let us be clear that to sacrifice our military efficiency to political correctness is wholly unacceptable. By "unacceptable", I mean unacceptable to the people of this country.
	At this time, we are engaged in war against revolutionary terrorism throughout the world. Let me offer a definition of such terrorism. It comes from a book entitled Revolutionary Change, which was written by Professor Chalmers Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley and was published as long ago as 1983. He said:
	"Revolutionary terrorism is the use of violence against insignificant people in order to affect the behaviour of significant people or their supporters".
	Could there be a better description of what is happening daily in Iraq and of what happened last week in London?
	Our Prime Minister is standing with Churchillian defiance against such actions. But, apart from those who, entirely legitimately, disagree with the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are those whose hatred of the motives as well as the actions of our Government leads them to use any means to discredit and undermine our Armed Forces. To some of them, every enemy death is murder. They shelter under the cloak of political correctness, but they are, for our country, an enemy within. It is for the Government, especially the Ministry of Defence, to defend the Armed Forces against them.
	I hope that the debate will result in the Government giving much better backing, not just in resources and equipment—crucial though they are—but in political support for our Armed Forces. I believe that the superb professional efficiency of our Armed Forces is unmatched in any country and that their standing in the eyes of the British people has never been higher.

Viscount Slim: My Lords, I believe that the route this Government are taking is towards making a soldier a civilian, instead of making a civilian a soldier.
	Heaping enormous extra outside responsibilities on the shoulders of a commanding officer when he is the key person in command in battle is wrong. He has around him people from health and safety, prosecutors, SIB investigators and a tame, and often very courageous, journalist.
	The military ethos is being destroyed. It is appalling that the Government today are besotted with political correctness. It does not work in the military. You do not kill or beat the enemy or the terrorist with large doses of that.
	As other noble Lords have mentioned, there is mistrust. There is a feeling that those higher in the chain of command are not with the troops, but are all the time are looking at and investigating them with people who have never been on the front line.
	In that connection, many noble Lords, like me, are amazed at what happened in Brussels. Why did our Government not protect and support the military? Who was in charge of this? Other countries seem to have made a sensible decision and obtained an opt out for their military, but not us. I call that bad government. I find it most unimpressive.
	To shore everything up, the Government are now pushing new rules and systems. They are sliding everything to the legal side. In a short time to come, I can see the Minister, or the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General, saying that he cannot say anything about a matter because it is sub judice. It is as if the politician today is getting himself out of responsibility and accountability. That is not good, but it is typical.
	We have heard from much more senior persons than me about what happens in an incident, a battle or close-quarter combat. I would like to bring the Government Front Bench down to earth a bit. We could be looking at each other at half the distance between the Minister and me now. It could be night-time, raining or extremely dusty, and close-quarter combat could be taking place. I shall give two instances, because I am told that similar cases are among the 170 cases.
	Two soldiers could enter a room, or go up a road or an alley and suddenly someone gets up with his hands up. I have learnt in practice that if a man puts his hands up, he is thinking and he is very dangerous. When you have the sort of enemy that we have today, who does not mind going to his maker more quickly than most normal people, a man with his hands up is a big problem. You cannot turn your back on him, nobody can. You do not know what he has on him. In the same way, you do not ask a man lying on the ground to stand up. That may be just what he wants because underneath him is a grenade with the pin out and the moment he stands up, he goes to his maker and will be a great martyr and the soldier is killed. Frankly, the solution in action in close combat is to give both these men two bullets. There is no question. Chaps in the rear area had better be familiar with that, but I am afraid that the investigators are not.
	What really worries me is the treatment of a brave and honourable man who has put his life on the line and has done what in his eyes is his duty. What happens to him? He goes further and further back down the line, away from his commanding officer, his platoon commander and his NCOs. He meets only civilians and the odd lawyer dressed in uniform. He is lost. Where do you put him? Who is this honourable man's best friend? I have heard so much that is wrong and bad about the Y list that has been adopted. A soldier is forgotten and forsaken. He is not even approached. Who looks after him?
	Furthermore, who looks after him when he has had his court case? The Minister knows from his time in industry that if a form has been filled in and a person has been interviewed, even if he has been exonerated or acquitted, he is looked at twice and an employer asks himself whether to employ him. Who is going to employ that exonerated, honourable man?
	I believe that a lot is wrong here. The Government have forgotten that they are here to protect and support the soldier, sailor and airman. The other day, the Prime Minister said that it is time to get respect back. How much I agree with him. It is time that the Government started to protect, support and respect the military.

Lord De Mauley: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for initiating this debate.
	I start by declaring an interest as a recent commanding officer of a Territorial Army regiment. During my command a larger proportion of us went abroad to operational theatres than at any time since 1945. So I hope that the commanding officer's perspective might be helpful, as, indeed, might be that of the reservist, who can perhaps bring a civil/military balance.
	The essence of the problem we are discussing is the erosion of the commanding officer's authority over his regiment or battalion, and also, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned, commanding officers' real concerns that they are not supported by the chain of command, which I can confirm first hand.
	One obvious case, but it is only one of several, is that of Trooper Williams of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, with which regiment mine has a close relationship and with whose commanding officer at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Hankinson, I have discussed the case. He was, I may say, the finest of commanding officers, having been selected from another regiment to come into the Royal Tank Regiment and whose calibre has been recognised in his subsequent promotion.
	A number of other cases are pending, and we must take the lessons from the case of Trooper Williams, which is now concluded, and use them to avoid similar problems in the future. I hope that that is what today's most welcome debate might help to achieve.
	What formerly happened when a soldier committed a potential breach of the rules of engagement was that his commanding officer investigated the matter with the benefit of all relevant witnesses, investigations by the Royal Military Police, and, if required, the Special Investigations Branch, and the legal advice he required. He made the decision as to the soldier's guilt, or lack of it, because he was trained and experienced to do so, and because he was the best placed man to do so, knowing the particular operational and environmental circumstances of the alleged offence. Provided the soldier in question did not appeal, the commanding officer's decision was final.
	What happened in the Trooper Williams case was that, the above procedures having been properly followed, some faceless bureaucrat in the military justice system, with huge authority but no responsibility, was able to re-open the case and persuade the Army Board to refer it to the Attorney-General. Trooper Williams, the soldier in the line of fire, believed that he could not be tried twice for the same offence. He had, in his eyes, been tried by his commanding officer. To re-open the case with no new evidence undermined not only the authority of the commanding officer but also the justice of the system and the confidence of our soldiers in it.
	Trooper Williams's rules of engagement were clear. There was no question in his mind that the lives of his military police colleague and himself were threatened. He was clear that he was absolutely entitled, indeed obliged, to fire. So he did. He was entirely within his rights—not only his rights but his duty.
	The Army Act required his commanding officer to investigate, which he did, thoroughly, taking into account advice from the Army Legal Branch. He concluded that Trooper Williams had acted properly and in good faith. End of story. Who would have the arrogance to question him? But, as we all know, the case was re-opened, and a terrible injustice was done.
	The British commanding officer is the unbiased but informed judge of his soldier, who well understands him to be entirely dispassionate and impartial. If anyone should question that impartiality, perhaps I may be permitted to quote from the speech of Colonel Tim Collins of the Royal Irish Regiment, who, like Lieutenant Colonel Hankinson, briefed his entire regiment shortly before going into action, whose words give the essence of the message being given to all our soldiers. Among other things, he said:
	"It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly".
	He also said:
	"You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest".
	This matter is about judgment, training and experience. I do not think anyone would seriously question that British commanding officers, like their soldiers, are among the best trained in the world. I can say that senior officers of other armies cannot comprehend why we should not trust our commanding officers, each of whom, after all, we already entrust with the lives of several hundred men.
	To challenge them represents a wholly unwarranted interference in a well tried military process. Interference of this kind arises out of a politically correct view that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. It parallels the political commissars of the Soviet Army who did not bat an eyelid at arranging for a young officer who showed unusual leadership flair to be shot for a trumped-up political misdemeanour.
	It is wearing down the fighting spirit of our soldiers by eroding their trust and sapping their morale, and it is damaging our Army. Our enemies must be enjoying it. Imagine going to war with the idea in the back of your mind that you run the risk of being tried for murder for doing your duty.
	Trooper Williams was eventually exonerated, having spent 18 months with a murder charge hanging over him. But if he had not been exonerated, it is us, the chain of command, right up to the top of government, who have put this 18 year-old soldier in the position in which he made his lethal decision. We have armed him, trained him and sent him on operations. We must take responsibility.

Lord Goldsmith: My Lords, with the leave of the House and with the leave of the noble and learned Lord, perhaps I may make an observation. As your Lordships may notice from my garb, I am presently appearing in front of the Judicial Committee of this House, arguing the validity of the Parliaments Acts and the Hunting Act. That is why I have not been present in the Chamber listening to the debate, which otherwise I would have wanted to be, even though it is rightly a matter for the Ministry of Defence to respond to the debate.
	I wanted to take the opportunity to explain that as I understand that that issue has been raised, and so that your Lordships will understand that there is no discourtesy on my part. I shall of course read all noble Lords' contributions with the greatest of attention when I get Hansard. If your Lordships will allow me, I shall return to the Judicial Committee.

Lord Mayhew of Twysden: My Lords, with the leave of the House, having made a criticism of the Attorney-General for being absent, perhaps I may say that I accept and understand what he has just said. It just would have been helpful had we known about it in advance.

Lord Lloyd of Berwick: My Lords, my contribution to this important debate—every speaker has so far described it as an important debate, and so it is—lies perhaps on the fringes, although it was briefly touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Moonie, in his excellent maiden speech. The point arises from my involvement in another case which has some similarities with the case of Trooper Williams. It is the case of Clegg, which is reported in Appeal Cases 1995 at page 482.
	The facts of that case will be familiar to many, and I know that they will be familiar to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall. It concerns a soldier in Northern Ireland who fired a shot into the back of a car, which had been driven at speed through a check point. The shot which he fired killed one of the passengers in the car. The soldier was charged with murder, as was inevitable as the law then stood, and as the law still stands, because he clearly intended to cause either death or serious bodily harm. His only defence therefore could have been that of self-defence, but that defence was a difficult one to run, since he fired the fatal shot after the car had passed through the check point.
	I shall return later to the importance of that case in relation to this debate. Perhaps I may first say very briefly something about the position of the Armed Forces in relation to the law. We had much discussion last year about constitutional questions; in particular, the rule of law. For me, the rule of law means simply that everyone, including the Government, is subject to the law. More important for the purposes of the present debate, it means also that everyone is subject to the same law.
	In a free country there is not and cannot be one law for soldiers and another for citizens. I believe that all noble and gallant Lords who have made such powerful speeches today would accept that basic point. Indeed, we frequently boast of the fact that our soldiers are citizens in uniform.
	It is true, as has been emphasised today and is often emphasised, that soldiers have to make split-second decisions involving life and death. Clegg had to make such a decision. Trooper Williams had to make such a decision. But so do the police, more and more of whom are now armed. They too have to make split-second decisions, but no one suggests that the police should be for any reason above the law or subject to some different law.
	I remember a tragic case in Sussex not long ago, where two police officers shot an unarmed man in bed in the belief that he had a gun under the blankets. He did not. In that case the law had to take its ordinary course. That is what I mean when I say that both the police and our Armed Forces have to be subject to the ordinary law. That has always been a point of great constitutional importance.
	Perhaps I may quote some little authority in support. Lord Mansfield as long ago as 1812 corrected, as he said, the,
	"strange mistaken notion which has got abroad, that because men are soldiers they cease to be citizens".
	Blackstone, in volume one of his Commentaries, wrote,
	"In a land of liberty it is extremely dangerous to make a distinct order of the profession of arms . . . [A soldier] puts not off the citizen when he enters the camp; but it is because he is a citizen, and would wish to continue so, that he makes himself for a while a soldier".
	Finally, I quote Halsbury's Laws of England:
	"It is one of the cardinal features of the law of England that a person does not, by enlisting in . . . the armed forces, thereby cease to be a citizen, so as to deprive him of his rights or exempt him from his liabilities under the ordinary law of the land".
	Having said all that, it does not follow that I am satisfied with the law as it currently stands. That brings me back to the case of Clegg. I am not satisfied with the law. It should have been possible to charge Clegg with manslaughter, and not with murder, as had to be the case then and would still have to be the case now. If he could have been charged with manslaughter and if he had been found guilty he would have been subject to a modest term of imprisonment depending on all the circumstances of the case and not, as had to be the case, sentenced to life imprisonment.
	That point has been made over and over again. We made it at great length in our judgment in the Clegg case. It is made by the Criminal Law Revision Committee, by the Law Commission and by the House of Lords Select Committee on the law of murder. The law of homicide is currently being considered by a Home Office committee. I have said before that I wish that committee had been more widely based. I hope that it will take into account the powerful things that have been said today and recommend a change in the law accordingly.

Earl Attlee: My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway on introducing this important debate and remind the House of my peripheral interest. It seems that nearly all the meat on this skeleton has been comprehensively shotblasted off by noble and gallant Lords and other noble Lords, who have far more experience than me.
	All noble Lords expected noble and gallant Lords to be tough, but in my 13 years in your Lordships' House I have never heard noble and gallant Lords being so forceful. My noble friend Lord Marlesford referred to their dire warnings.
	The situation is bizarre and perilous. This Government, and to an extent their predecessors, have been steadily eroding the capacity of officers at all levels to exercise military discipline—and I mean military discipline. They do so as a sacrifice to the high altar of ECHR.
	Yet, at the same time, they are surprised when things go wrong. They appear to be content for Trooper Williams and other similar cases to run their course. It seems that some are more concerned that officers maintain a perfect system of military justice instead of military discipline with checks and balances, and rather less about officers making poor tactical judgments with their attendant serious consequences.
	The G1 situation is in extremely poor shape. We have undermanning and overstretch because we are operating outside the defence planning assumptions. Tour intervals are far too short. We have poor service accommodation. The TA cupboard is practically bare, and will be for at least another two years, because the TA has been used to sustain enduring operations rather than facilitate operations at the large scale of effort.
	We are experiencing falling standards of discipline and military ethos, and the grievance procedure is under severe strain. It does not mean that our Armed Forces are no longer effective—clearly they are still extremely effective—but it does mean that we are not maintaining standards. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, covered the need for the commanding officer to retain his powers. He did so far better than I could and I shall not attempt to do that myself.
	What evidence do I have for my assertions? We have recently incorporated the Bail Act 1976 into service law. That means that servicemen can be detained only if there is a risk of them interfering with witnesses or absconding. It is not now easy to detain a serviceman for his own good or to protect other members of the unit from violence.
	It is also much more difficult to take disciplinary action. Some time ago I informed your Lordships' House that I reported the driver of a heavy recovery vehicle towing another heavy recovery vehicle for reckless driving. He was speeding: he overtook me on the A303 when I was driving at between 60 mph and 70 mph. I reported the circumstances to the Royal Military Police and they did not take a statement from me, even though I was a well qualified witness. That meant that no disciplinary action could be taken.
	A frequent complaint I hear from good-quality junior soldiers is that they see poorer quality soldiers "getting away with it". A good example is insubordination because it is difficult to provide a watertight case. It requires the judgment of the officers in the chain of command. Of course, it is a purely military offence: there is no civilian equivalent. But, at the same time, those good soldiers properly face disciplinary action for what I call "there but for the grace of God go I"-type offences. I have been there myself.
	Those are all matters for Ministers since they proposed the changes to legislation enacted by Parliament. What depresses me most is that Front-Bench politicians seem reluctant to question the appropriateness of the ECHR.
	Turning to another G1 issue, during OPTELIC 1, we deployed 32,000 men and women in the land component alone, to which we should add the maritime and air components. The operation was launched amid some controversy and lack of public support. All of us engaged in that operation did so with the utmost vigour, zeal and energy. Ministers invariably heap praise on our Armed Forces for the effect that we achieve. Of course, we left it to others to worry about the rights and wrongs of the operation, but we all faced the perils of war.
	We were also aware of the risk of misconduct on operations—the subject of our debate. I suspect that many of us secretly fear a question about our conduct on operations. Perhaps that fear was greater than that of being wounded or killed on operations. When I meet one of my former colleagues on that operation, we invariably ask each other: "Have you got it?" Two years later we ask the same question. "It", of course, is the campaign medal for that operation. I have resisted raising the issue for a long time for reasons that will be obvious to your Lordships. But I think that more than two years after the end of OPTELIC 1, I am entitled to ask why the vast majority of us engaged in that operation have not already received that campaign medal.
	Last week, a one-star officer who served on OPTELIC forcefully impressed on me how unhappy and embarrassed he was about appearing in service dress without his campaign medal—that sandy-coloured medal that everyone recognises. I have been in the same position as a Member of your Lordships' House. I must now sit down.

Lord Garden: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, for initiating this important debate. It has been valuable to hear from every one of the noble and gallant Lords and those of your Lordships who take a special interest in the Armed Forces. I especially congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Moonie, on an excellent maiden speech; we made several important points that I think that we will take forward when we consider the Armed Forces Bill.
	Inevitably, the debate has focused on the particulars of individual cases; Trooper Williams has been central to many speeches. Badly handled individual cases may not be the most appropriate way to generalise major changes in law. There are lessons to be learnt from the specifics of the Trooper Williams case and others mentioned by your Lordships about how they are handled, but there are separate issues about what that means for the legal and disciplinary regime under which our Armed Forces operate.
	A debate covering similar issues took place in the other place on 14 June. In opening the debate, Mr Julian Brazier said:
	"we owe a special duty of care to those men and women who are required to take daily risks with their lives on our behalf, and to carry duties that no other job requires. The military structure has to provide them with a working environment in which there are clearly understood rules, and with an ethos that enabled men and women who regard themselves as ordinary to deliver quite extraordinary things again and again".—[Official Report, Commons, 14/6/05; col. 227.]
	I associate those of us on these Benches with those remarks. We are extraordinarily fortunate because we have a military of which we can be rightly proud. We must also ensure that we do not allow the Government of the day—of whatever colour—to exploit the loyalty and lack of voice of our Armed Forces.
	However, we must also consider what makes our military work in that way. Why do they, almost always without exception, operate within the rule of law? Hence, they are the most effective in both war-fighting situations and in the difficult operations in support of civil power. The number of cases in which British forces are alleged to be operating beyond the law are very few, given the range of worldwide operations that we are now undertaking and the provocations under which they find themselves in many of them.
	We have been rightly described as having a role in the world of being a force for good. But to operate within the rule of law requires that our forces are subject to the rule of law. We are not excused from our responsibilities because some of our enemies ignore human rights and the Geneva Convention. In Iraq, our aim is to promote democracy and the rule of law. That means that we must operate within those rules. If we try to justify a lower standard, I fear we are on a slippery slope.
	We have seen at Abu Ghraib where an ambiguous message from above can lead. Most importantly, such abuses of human rights lead to resentment in the population and feed insurgencies that may mean that ultimately we lose the battle. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, made an important contribution on the question of accountability. We cannot ignore it.
	Our ratification of the International Criminal Court was a major step forward for this country in progress towards a better world. The Government were right to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights in our national law. We should not ignore the obligations under which both those measures put us. Those obligations also include rights, which apply to our servicemen as well.
	Although some noble Lords have raised the concern that the ICC could come into play in a case against a UK service person, we support the Government view that there would have to be a catastrophic failure of the UK criminal justice system for the ICC to assume jurisdiction. It is not helpful to worry our Armed Forces by suggesting otherwise.
	From that, noble Lords will understand that we are not sympathetic to the calls for exemptions for our military when on operations. However, that does not mean that we can be content with the way that our Armed Forces have been supported by the Government in their difficult work. The cases we have heard about demonstrate that there is a real problem that the MoD must address urgently.
	Mistakes were made in the handling of the Trooper Williams case, as we have heard. There was a blunder that led to overturning the commanding officer's decision. The second blunder was, with the benefit of hindsight, a misjudgment about going for trial in a case that would not succeed. Those errors were compounded by the unacceptable delay that Trooper Williams suffered. It is the individual who suffers, who is worried. To have to live for two years under the fear of imprisonment for murder is unacceptable. I do not doubt that the Minister will assure us that Trooper Williams received every support from the MoD, but there seems to be a valid argument that more could and should have been done. We have begun to grow too used to the MoD hardening its collective heart to the determent of individuals in the Armed Forces.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, was right to draw our attention yet again to the duty of care. We have queried whether the MoD is meeting its duty of care in so many areas recently. The duty of care that the Government have to our Armed Forces is greater than to any other sector of their employees. They cannot go on strike; they cannot speak out; they must go where they are sent and, if necessary, be prepared to give their lives.
	The lesson from the Trooper Williams case and others in the pipeline is surely that the MoD must investigate all allegations promptly, fully and dispassionately, not assuming guilt. That means providing the necessary resources in military investigators and legal expertise. We cannot have months go past with those accused in a legal limbo.
	If we need evidence that that is a problem, we need go no further than a case that has not been mentioned today: that involving the tragic death of a five year-old girl caught up in the ropes of a recreational balloon being operated by a soldier. It was written up in yesterday's Guardian. It has taken two years to come to court martial. Judge Blackett, the judge of the case, is reported as saying:
	"The army prosecution service is to be criticised severely for letting the case run for so long. Lack of budget and manpower resources is simply no excuse when dealing with homicide".
	He is right; those timescales are fair neither to the accused nor to the victims. I trust that the Minister will assure us that the Ministry of Defence is increasing the number of personnel in both the legal services and the investigation units, so that we can shorten those timescales.
	Commanding officers must be able to depend on the legal advice that they receive in reviewing cases. I hope that we shall hear some further explanation of what went wrong in the Williams case, and what is being done to rectify the situation. Further, in the event that a member of the Armed Forces has to face civilian charges and a civilian court, he or she must receive full support on the basis that a person is innocent until proved guilty.
	We are all justly proud of our Armed Forces who are now being asked to operate in the most difficult of circumstances under the rule of law. The vast majority manage to do this with outstanding results. But there will inevitably be allegations from time to time that must be investigated swiftly. When there is evidence of wrongdoing those involved must be brought to trial. Our military achieves all that it does by operating under the rule of law without exemption. The thoughts that we might look towards new applications of manslaughter instead of murder are important issues raised in today's debate, which I hope we will take forward when we consider the Armed Forces Bill.
	The current set of rules do not compromise the chain of command provided that everyone does his job properly. That must include proper support from the Ministry of Defence.

Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Campbell of Alloway on securing this important debate. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will not ignore the message that has been sent out today in some very powerful speeches. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Moonie, on an excellent maiden speech.
	Our Armed Forces today are very different, even from their recent predecessors, and they face a very different set of challenges. Since the end of the Cold War their role has been transformed from providing a buttress against the Soviet bloc in Europe to enabling the execution of numerous, concurrent operations of variable duration worldwide.
	Once they are in theatre we require our soldiers to switch seamlessly from war fighting to peacekeeping, sometimes almost overnight, with little thought to what that actually represents. Success of operations depends on many factors, prominent among which is the ability and will of soldiers at all levels to take instant, difficult decisions in the most dangerous and confused situations.
	Such decisions frequently involve risk—often high risk. Invariably they are made under conditions that are far from ideal, such as fear, fatigue, confusion and concern for each other's safety, and generally without the full range of information. In Iraq, our troops sometimes have only about four hours of sleep a day—probably in two-hour bursts. On top of that, they operate in sweltering temperatures of between 40 and 50 degrees.
	To execute those tasks successfully requires a flexibility of mind and purpose. That makes it all the more important that every soldier is confident of the effectiveness of the chain of command, and that he trusts it implicitly. Soldiers must be confident that they will be supported by the judicial system, with full account being taken of the operational circumstances in which decisions were taken, and provided that they acted lawfully and according to their rules of engagement.
	If the chain of command, which is actually a two-way chain of trust, is undermined by external pressures and an overly legalistic approach, the subtle relationship on which military success depends will be put at very grave risk. Several noble Lords, including my noble and learned friend Lord Mayhew and my noble friend Lord Marlesford mentioned Trooper Williams. His treatment should be taken as a stark warning of the dangers that lie ahead for the Armed Forces if that trend continues unchecked.
	What signal does that case send to our people serving around the world? Can they trust the word of their superiors? Can they trust the Government who send them into combat so frequently to stand behind them when they need support? The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, pointed out that no one trusts the system. The noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, drew our attention, in an excellent speech, to the case of Colonel Mendonca, and my noble friend Lord De Mauley referred to Colonel Tim Collins. Those two cases sent further worrying and conflicting signals to fellow soldiers.
	Those concerns do not simply evaporate on learning that Trooper Williams has been finally, and rightfully, cleared of all charges after nearly two years on the rack. I also pay tribute to General Sir Anthony Walker.
	My noble friend Lady Park mentioned the duty of care. But Trooper Williams's acquittal was greeted with silence from the MoD. What a difference a few words of pleasure at the outcome would have made—not just to Williams but to the 65,000 members of our Armed Forces who have served their term in the Gulf in the past two years. There are 9,200 still there as we speak, and the issue is an ever-present, real and quite inexcusable addition to their already considerable burden.
	The sense that prosecutions resolved in accordance with the prompt application of military law may be reopened at the whim of some lawyer sitting in the comfort and safety of his office is exacerbating the atmosphere of uncertainty and vulnerability. We look to the Minister to assure the House that the decisions that have been taken in that sense are entirely exceptional and are not envisaged to become standard practice.
	There is a real danger of a fundamental loss of confidence in the Armed Forces that will lead to the sort of operational paralysis evident in the armies of some other NATO countries. I understand that the Tri-Service Discipline Bill will be introduced in mid-November. We on these Benches have consistently set out our concerns about the Government's intentions. We shall consider carefully all the Bill's implications before we finalise our attitude to it, but our current view is that it must meet the following tests.
	First, the essential authority of the commanding officer must not be undermined by the shadow of civil criminal proceedings or the ICC. Secondly, the chain of command must not be compromised by unwarranted changes in the process of enforcing military law. Thirdly, there must be an understanding that military law and how it is applied must continue to reflect the circumstances under which the Armed Forces operate. Fourthly, the Bill must not compromise the ability or willingness of our Armed Forces to take necessary action in theatres of war.
	Our soldiers are already subjected to external pressures that were unknown in Cold War scenarios—for example, ever-intensifying media scrutiny and the involvement of supra-national bodies such as the International Criminal Court. I remind the Minister that when debating the jurisdiction of the ICC, my honourable friend Francis Maude, the then shadow Foreign Secretary, called for the seven-year opt-out, which is already exercised by the French Government, and for a watertight opt-out, which enables Ministers who are confident that a case is completely vexatious to ensure that a warrant is not executed against a member of the British Armed Forces. Neither of those two provisions is in the Act.
	We are witnessing a growing fear of legal vulnerability that will inevitably jeopardise the risk-taking culture that is so essential to the fighting spirit and operational success of the Armed Forces. In this climate of uncertainty troops may hesitate to use lethal force for fear of prosecution. Their lives may be lost as a result. In addressing these issues, we must start with a recognition that the military is different from the society at large. The Government failed to do that during the passage of the Armed Forces (Pensions and Compensation) Bill.
	The earlier intervention of the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General reflects the Government's priorities in that he had to attend a hearing to defend the abolition of hunting rather than this very important debate today.
	I want to make it clear that we on these Benches do not for one second seek to defend any solider of any nation who abuses his or her uniform and commits atrocities against civilians or helpless prisoners. Servicemen and women are not above the law. But we cannot allow the trend of political correctness to infuse the Armed Forces undermining trust, discipline and command relationships. Above all, we cannot afford to see the mechanisms by which military discipline is maintained—the authority of the service boards, the court martial system and summary jurisdiction by commanding officers—undermined any further. They are already on the verge of having been irreparably damaged.
	The civil courtroom can neither recreate nor fully comprehend the unique conditions of the battlefield; nor must we recreate a climate in which a soldier, faced with a speeding truck bearing down on him, is forced to think, "I believe I ought to shoot that driver, but perhaps I better telephone my lawyer and check that it is okay". We ask much of our young servicemen and women. They deserve our support.

Lord Drayson: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, on the subject of this debate. The integrity and legal authority of the chain of command is central to the effectiveness of our Armed Forces and to the fair treatment of all our people who serve so bravely in it. Nothing is more important that that. I am grateful to the noble Lord for providing the opportunity for the House to focus on this vital subject.
	The debate is timely. Many noble Lords have mentioned the concerns that currently exist in our forces, and we recognise that that is the case. The noble and gallant Lords, Lord Bramall and Lord Boyce, stated their deep disquiet. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, stated his concern that the chain of command is being eroded. The noble Viscount, Lord Slim, and others, have stated their real concerns over political correctness. I am glad today to have the opportunity to address those concerns directly, to show that they are unfounded and to underline the Government's commitments to maintaining a clear and unambiguous chain of command in Her Majesty's Armed Forces.
	This has been an excellent debate, which has yet again shown the deep experience and knowledge of defence matters that so distinguishes this House. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, especially those noble and gallant Lords on the Cross Benches who have drawn on their distinguished service in the Armed Forces. I am also grateful for their contributions made to me directly since I recently took up my post in the Ministry of Defence. I congratulate, too, my noble friend Lord Moonie, who made an excellent maiden speech.
	The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, and the noble Baroness, Lady Park, mentioned overstretch in the military. Our Armed Forces have a hard-earned and thoroughly deserved international reputation for effectiveness in the full range of modern military tasks from war fighting to peace support. Our forces are the best in the world—nowhere has that been more clearly demonstrated than in Iraq. They continue to make a substantial contribution towards the creation of a free, democratic and stable Iraq as well as to the many other operational theatres in which they are engaged.
	I was pleased to be able to see that for myself on a visit to troops in Basra between 6 and 8 July last week. I was struck by the enthusiasm and professionalism of everyone I spoke to at all ranks. They are dedicated to fulfilling their task to the very best of their ability. I was particularly struck by some young majors who are responsible for mentoring and training the Iraqi police, Iraqi army, and the Iraqi Department for Border Enforcement. They are all highly-motivated individuals with a real enthusiasm for helping the Iraqis to learn and develop. They knew that they were making a difference, and they knew that their help was appreciated. Going on patrol with the 12th Mechanised Brigade near the Shatt al-Arab hotel, I saw for myself the improving situation in the area, the cars on the roads, and the Iraqi people going about their business.
	Of course, I understand that there is still huge trauma in Iraq. There are wide variations in the picture across the country. One only had to see the news last night of the horrific suicide bombing of 12 children in Baghdad to see that. The greatest tragedy is the continued murder by terrorists in Iraq of Iraqi people who are trying to secure the freedoms and the liberties that we enjoy. Seeing our brave young men and women working to help those people achieve that was an inspiration to me. It proved to me that what we are doing in Iraq is a right and noble cause, and that what we state as our core values of the British Armed Forces being a force for good in the world is true, is real, and is happening today in Iraq to make it and the world a better place.
	However, we recognise that what we ask of our people in places such as Basra puts great strain on them, as the noble Baroness highlighted. Nation-building in a country so ravaged by years of poverty, oppression and conflict as Iraq is difficult. On top of that, as the noble Lord, Lord Astor, highlighted, our forces are under scrutiny every day in the 21st century world of 24-hour news, embedded journalists and highly active and vocal NGOs. The vital importance of our system of discipline and chain of command cannot be overemphasised. It must deliver both the military effectiveness and the high ethical standards that we demand of our Armed Forces.
	The overwhelming majority of our personnel have served in Iraq with honour and distinction. I am very proud of what they have achieved and continue to achieve, and I know that my ministerial colleagues feel the same. Only a very small number have been involved in incidents that have resulted in criminal prosecutions—we should not overstate the issue. As several noble and gallant Lords will know much better than I do, such incidents have had to be dealt with in the past—in Northern Ireland, for example. That said, I recognise that the focus in the media and other places on the handling of those incidents has led to concerns in some quarters, and in particular in our Armed Forces, over the process of legal oversight. I stress that we recognise that those concerns exist, and we are addressing them. I welcome the opportunity today to correct some misapprehensions and set out why these concerns are unfounded.
	All that reflects what has long been the case: that the Armed Forces operate within the law and the country has confidence that this is the case. Surely no noble Lord would argue that this is not so? They must encompass respect for the law. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, said, everyone in this House accepts that. If allegations are made of serious offences, it is right and proper that the service police investigate them. It has been suggested that they are overzealous in conducting those investigations, but I assure noble Lords that they operate to appropriate professional standards and are not subject to any political direction, or direction from higher authority, to do more than that. I am sure that noble Lords have not forgotten those members of the Royal Military Police murdered by a mob in Basra.
	I also stress that the 176 cases that have been referred to today are the number of investigations carried out by the service police into allegations of wrongdoing against Iraqis since the start of operations in Iraq. Some 100 of those 176 cases related to incidents where British forces were fired upon. There are not 176 prosecutions—151 investigations have been closed with no further action. That needs to be seen in the context of some 70,000 personnel who have served in Iraq.
	There is nothing new in service personnel being investigated for alleged crimes, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, highlighted. It happened, for example, as a result of the Falklands and Bosnia campaigns. Investigations did not start with the establishment of the International Criminal Court. My noble friend Lord Hoyle mentioned the Baha Musa case. He will understand that I cannot discuss that case, which is currently being considered by the Army prosecuting authority. A decision is expected shortly.
	The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, the noble Lord, Lord Garden, and others raised the propriety of referring the Trooper Williams case to the Attorney-General. I shall make some points about that case. Once concerns had been raised in Army Legal Services about the legal advice given to the commanding officer, it was necessary and proper for the Army to bring the matter to the Attorney-General's attention, because the military justice system was no longer able to deal with the case. The final judge made no criticism of any of those involved.
	Throughout all investigations, those accused are entitled to and will receive support and guidance from their chain of command before, during and after any investigation. That includes access to independent legal assistance.
	The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, my noble friend Lady Dean and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, highlighted the case of Trooper Williams, who behaved with great dignity throughout. He was supported by the Army, who appointed a full-time assisting officer to ensure that he had all the information and help that he needed and to provide a liaison point for the Army and his defence team. The cost of his defence was met in full by the Ministry of Defence. During his time on bail, the Army ensured that he remained gainfully employed. As for all soldiers, his welfare was the Army's primary concern. My noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe mentioned the great burden of uncertainty that Trooper Williams had to bear. Timeliness is key. I assure the House that lessons have been learnt from his case.
	The military justice system is the bedrock of the chain of command. It applies to wrongs done by one member of the Armed Forces to another and to wrongs done by a member of the Armed Forces to a civilian. We see the commanding officer as central to the authority of the chain of command. He is the primary authority responsible not only for his unit's discipline but for the command, training, safety, security, education, health, welfare, morale and general efficiency of his troops. That wide span of responsibility illustrates why it is so important that the commanding officer is able to exercise disciplinary powers. He is uniquely placed to understand the circumstances of service life and of his particular unit and, hence, the causes and significance of misconduct.
	Many of the issues raised during our debate have been prompted by concerns over the International Criminal Court and the European Convention on Human Rights. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, asked for answers. I am happy to give them, but first I shall deal briefly with a number of misunderstandings about the ICC.
	It has been suggested there is a real possibility that our forces will find themselves standing in the dock on trial in The Hague, whether the UK likes it or not. That is wrong, and I shall explain why. The court's jurisdiction is carefully set out in the ICC statute. The entire premise of the court is based on the principle that it can only—I repeat, only—exercise its jurisdiction when a state is unable or unwilling genuinely to investigate or prosecute itself. Surely we do not envisage that the United Kingdom will ever be in that position.
	I am happy to reassure noble Lords, in particular the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Inge, Lord Guthrie and Lord Boyce, that it is unthinkable for British forces personnel to be sent to the ICC. At Second Reading of the International Criminal Court Bill in the other place in 2001, the Foreign Secretary told the House that,
	"British service personnel will never be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court because any bona fide allegation will be pursued by the British authorities".—[Official Report, Commons, 3/4/2001; col. 222.]
	We remain confident that UK authorities will always act properly. As long as they do, there will never be any basis for the ICC to exercise jurisdiction.
	Some have also suggested that the ICC will be politically driven and cannot be trusted to act properly. The Government have complete confidence in the independence and integrity of the court and the prosecutor. We are in good company in that judgment; 99 countries have so far ratified the statute, including 22 of our 25 NATO partners and 22 Commonwealth countries. We have nothing to fear from the ICC.
	Another myth is that, by ratifying the statute and enacting the International Criminal Court Act 2001, the Government have exposed our forces to a risk of prosecution that they did not previously face. That is not the case. Those who oppose the ICC often overlook the fact that, before we ratified the ICC statute, the UK had already fought one conflict while subject to the jurisdiction of an international criminal tribunal.
	I now turn to the European Convention on Human Rights. It seems ironic that those who are concerned about the possibility of our soldiers being subject to unfair prosecution also express concern about the convention. That perhaps relates to a misunderstanding of the convention's role. The primary purpose of Article 6 is to ensure a fair trial for the individual. However, although the convention has resulted in developments in the service system and means that its fairness is under scrutiny, it should not be thought that the effect of the convention is to endanger our military system of justice.
	We should note the Baines case, in which the High Court, in its judgment on the case, upheld our system of commanding officers' summary jurisdiction as fully compliant with human rights law. We were pleased but not surprised at that decision. The noble Lord, Lord Astor, expressed his wish that the Ministry of Defence had expressed pleasure at the outcome of the Trooper Williams case. I am pleased to have the opportunity to express our pleasure, but not our surprise, at the outcome of the Baines case.
	I must make it clear that we see no merit in attempting to put our Armed Forces outside the convention, as has been raised. The United Kingdom ratified the convention without reservation in 1951, and successive governments have adhered to its principles and abided by the rulings of the European court. No one would argue that our forces have become less effective as a consequence of that.
	The Government do not believe that the military justice system is in any way undermined by the convention. Indeed, for over 50 years the formulation of policy and regulations for the Armed Forces has taken account of compliance with the convention. Various aspects of military life and operations have been affected by it, although some of those changes may have happened anyway. I am thinking particularly of the changes to procedures for summary trials and courts martial to ensure compliance with the right to a fair trial.
	As noble Lords will be aware, we propose to introduce an Armed Forces Bill later this year. With my honourable friend the Under-Secretary of State, I had the opportunity yesterday to speak to a number of your Lordships about some of the thinking about a number of areas in the Bill. I hope that those who were able to attend found the occasion useful. We are fully committed to maintaining a separate system of service law, able to deal with a wide range of disciplinary and criminal matters. I am happy to give the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, a clear statement of our commitment to that.
	We are clear about the essential nature of the ability of the commanding officer to exercise discipline in respect of those under his command, but the system must be fair, efficient and compliant with the European convention. We ask an enormous amount from members of the Armed Forces, and we owe them nothing less.
	The Bill will be a tangible demonstration of our commitment to a system of service law and will underline our determination to uphold the integrity and legal authority of the chain of command. I appreciate that there is a degree of frustration that we have not been able to publish the Bill in draft as yet. That may have contributed to some of the concerns that noble Lords have mentioned. It will be complex legislation. I look forward to further meetings with noble Lords through this year, as we move towards the Bill. We are making a strong effort to share our thinking to make sure that those with an interest have confidence in the approach that we are taking.
	Noble Lords will hear me state time and again in the area of my responsibilities for defence procurement and equipment the need for our Armed Forces to adapt and modernise to face new threats. The legal framework also has to be reformed, and we are working on that today. Your Lordships will of course have the full opportunity to scrutinise the detailed proposals when the Bill is published later this year, and I look forward to our discussions.
	In the time available, I have not been able to answer every question raised today. Where that is the case, I will write to noble Lords. However, I hope that I have been able to address the key points of concern and to state clearly the Government's position; to underline that the Government are listening and, as important, are acting; and to restate that they are firmly in support of our Armed Forces and that the Army Bill, on which we are working, is a central part of that action.
	The Secretary of State and the Chief of the Defence Staff stand ready to meet noble and gallant Lords and other Peers who have raised concerns today about the military justice system and the International Criminal Court. They would welcome the opportunity to listen at first hand to the concerns and to explain further the Government's position.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken, in particular the noble and gallant Lords, without whose contribution the perspective could not have been put.
	The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, gave an inkling of an understanding, when he said that the Government had learnt a lesson. Fair enough, but we heard nothing about what they will do about it. The House unanimously, with perhaps the exception of the noble Lord, came to the conclusion that here was a real problem that required urgent attention. It affected morale and other things too.
	The noble Lord's speech was disappointing in that regard. I hope that, on some future occasion, at the meetings that he suggested with the noble and gallant Lords, which of course I shall not be able to attend, they will make some progress. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Special Schools

Lord Baker of Dorking: rose to call attention to the case for special schools in meeting special educational needs; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the Royal London Society of the Blind. We maintain a school for visually impaired and blind children at Sevenoaks, Kent; namely, Dorton House. It is a centre of excellence. It is a beacon school. It gets alpha marks from all Ofsted reports. It has a nursery, a school and a college of further education.
	This debate brings the attention of your Lordships, and, I hope, a larger audience, to the failure of the Government's policy of inclusion for children with special educational needs. The legislation goes back to the Conservative period of 1981; that is, the Act that followed the Warnock report. In 1986, when I was Secretary of State, I extended to this policy benign neglect. We were far too busy doing things, such as the great education reform Bill, the curriculum, testing, grant-maintained schools, city technology colleges, student loans, per capita funding and everything else that we did.
	But the real reason why I was not keen on this policy came from my experience as a Member of Parliament. Every year, I received letters from constituents which begged me to take up the cases of their children who wanted to get into special schools. They were very anxious parents. I never, in the 30 years that I was in the House of Commons, received a latter from a parent or a child saying that he or she wanted to leave a special school to go to a mainstream school, although the enthusiasts on inclusion say that there are such examples. They never came my way. I think that they very rarely came the way of other Members of Parliament.
	Of course, there is a tremendous pressure to get into special schools. There is a special school very close to where I live in Sussex. North Lease is a school for dyslexic boys and girls, boarding as well as day pupils. Applications to that school come not just from the local area but also from Solihull, Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Suffolk.
	When the 2001 Act was debated in this House four years ago, various undertakings were given from the Front Bench opposite. There were many of us who moved amendments because we were concerned about the effect of the Bill on special schools. We were assured that there would be no pressure on those schools. The Minister at the time said that the Government would not put any pressure on special schools and that it would be up to local authorities. I hope that the Minister will not use that argument today.
	In Removing Barriers to Achievement, the Government very clearly state that,
	"the proportion of children educated in special schools should fall over time as mainstream schools grow in their skills and capacity to meet a wider range of needs".
	If those words mean anything, more special schools, over time, will close, which is as a direct result of the Government's policy.
	I appreciate that the great majority of children with special educational needs will spend their period of education in mainstream schools and I am familiar with the arguments; that is, the inclusion argument that they can sit alongside pupils who are not disadvantaged, can work together and become more of a society.
	But let us examine whether that policy is working. Last year, Ofsted issued the Special educational needs and disability report, in which the chief inspector stated:
	"A minority of mainstream schools meet special needs very well".
	I repeat: "a minority". That is a disgrace.
	"Progress in learning remains slower than it should be for a significant number of pupils".
	That is a disgrace.
	"The teaching seen of pupils with SEN was of varying quality, with a high proportion of lessons having shortcomings".
	That is a disgrace.
	"Over half the schools visited had no disability access plans and, of those plans that did exist, the majority focused only on accommodation".
	That is a disgrace.
	"Few of the schools visited had made substantial adaptations to the curriculum they offer to meet special needs".
	That is a disgrace.
	"However, few schools considered the progress of pupils with SEN specifically enough in relation to such targets. The seldom linked the progress of the pupils to the provision the school had made".
	That is a disgrace.
	I remember Keith Joseph telling the junior Ministers in his department always to read the inspectors' reports from cover to cover. So I started to look through some recent reports on special educational needs, which were published by the department. For example, Reading local education authority, in January 2005, was considered to be "unsatisfactory" and that,
	"monitoring and reporting of progress is insufficiently rigorous".
	Bradford was "unsatisfactory". As regards North Lincolnshire, there was "insufficient progress" and it remains "unsatisfactory". Torbay was described as "unsatisfactory" and its value for money was also "unsatisfactory". Trafford was "poor".
	For Coventry,
	"timescales for action do not focus sharply enough on improved outcomes for pupils or give sufficient attention to how success will be measured".
	Halton does not give "satisfactory value". Salford was considered "unsatisfactory" twice. Greenwich was "unsatisfactory" and the Isles of Scilly were "poor". Hackney was "unsatisfactory" and continuing to be unsatisfactory. Barnet had "significant weaknesses" and was "poor", while Northumberland and Leicestershire were "unsatisfactory".
	What more evidence do the Minister and the Government require to recognise that what they are providing in mainstream schools is totally unsatisfactory and is letting down the education of many children who deserve much better? It is a national disgrace because they are failing the needs of many children.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, will be speaking in this debate. She was the author of the report on which the 1981 Act was based. She has come to change her view and I congratulate her on that. It is quite difficult for people in public life to reject what they said earlier. In fact, many mainline politicians spend a great deal of their time avoiding that embarrassment. The noble Baroness is in good company; Keynes said:
	"When the facts change, I change my mind".
	That is what has happened with the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. The phrase that she used for the consequences of her policy is that it is a disastrous legacy.
	Ninety special schools have been closed since 1997. I know that the Minister will say that the Conservatives closed more. I do not remember how many dealt with, but if I dealt with any I was wrong, I admit it—mea culpa. What was wrong under the Conservatives is wrong now. So I hope that he will not use that argument.
	The Minister will also no doubt remember that last year 10,000 pupils were expelled from school. Three-quarters of those were children with special educational needs. Children with special educational needs are four times more likely to be excluded from mainstream schools than other pupils. Many pupils who have been expelled have behavioural problems.
	Will the Minister look at all the research in his department—I am sure that it has not changed since my time—which shows that you can identify at a very early age of five, six and seven, whether a pupil is likely to be troublesome? That is when there should be an intervention. That is when the pupil should be recognised and given particular attention in a separate unit. A handful of schools in the UK do that. When a child reaches the age of 12 or 13 and is troublesome, it is almost well-nigh impossible to catch up again. I hope that the noble Lord will have something to say about that.
	I should like to concentrate on two special schools—Dorton House and North Lease. I shall invite the Minister to visit them, with me, after the debate. The Government will say that special schools continue to exist. However, they are sending to special schools children with the most severe learning difficulties. In Dorton House we receive not only deaf children and blind children but also those who may have acute physical difficulties and emotional problems. They are the sort of children whom I used to see in what were then called hospital schools. I think that most of those have faded away. As these children cannot be educated in mainstream schools they are being sent to the special schools. However, many local authorities are not referring to special schools children with slightly less severe difficulties, and that is very difficult.
	The children who are getting referred to special schools are very acute cases and carry with them a fee of £100,000 a year. They need two teachers and possibly a minder. Special schools have a degree of expertise which should be available to other pupils. I heard of a case only a few days ago of a boy who has been referred at 13 to North Lease. He should have been referred at nine, but the local authority resisted. In those four years, he simply collapsed—his life collapsed around him. So by the time he went to a special school, at 13, he had lost his self-esteem, which has to be built up again. It was not recognised that he should have gone to a special school earlier.
	Parents can of course appeal to tribunals. Last year there were more than 1,000 parents. At each one, the local education authorities fight ferociously to deny the children access to special schools. They throw against the parents the wealth of the local authority, its administrative power and its professionalism, and the parents are made to feel as if they are in the dock. That is very regrettable.
	Why do LEAs fight so ferociously? It is because of money. It is very expensive to send children to special schools and they want to provide the education themselves. If they provided the same quality of service, I would not be making this speech today, but clearly they do not.
	As a result, parents become very frustrated. A woman in East Sussex called Susan James had an autistic grandson. Every day when she took him to school he howled all the way down the long drive. The local authority said he could go to a school with lots of other children with disabilities and disadvantages. Eventually, she set up her own small school, Step By Step, and pays £15,000 a year. That probably requires a second mortgage.
	TreeHouse School in London has been founded by Nick Hornby, the novelist. But many parents are not as articulate as Nick Hornby, or as wealthy, and they get very frustrated with the situation.
	It is the expertise of special schools that is so valuable. It is a tremendous resource. Take Braille teachers, for example. Only 70 are trained a year. At Dorton House we employ 23 and train four more. Kent is a progressive education authority which we are trying to help when it comes to blind teaching, yet there are only 19 Braille teachers for the whole county. Braille teaching is a one-to-one operation. To establish a Braille position costs about £10,000, with maintenance as well.
	I believe that many children of moderate disability are being denied the advantages that special schools can offer. So what should be done? First, there should be more money for the whole special education sector. The Minister is nodding. What an optimist. He has not actually sat before a Chief Secretary with his senior Minister. The noble Lord will say he wants zillions, but Mr Brown will have run out of money and what spare money there is will go to Africa. When they ask for really significant funds in the spending round next year, I guarantee that they will not be available for special education.
	Secondly, an independent review is needed. The Government will give us a review, and the circumstances were most extraordinary. During the election, the Prime Minister was cornered by a very irate mother for a quarter of an hour. She really had him, and the cameras were on this exchange all the time. She was frustrated at not getting her son into a special school. When he was about to go to one, the local education authority decided to close it.
	I am not criticising the Prime Minister—I would not expect him to know the details and minutiae of special education. He has other things on his plate. I do not think he has ever made a speech on special education. I may be wrong, and perhaps one could be sent to me if he has. In any event, he said that there will be a review. That was not in the Labour Party manifesto. I looked at it carefully to see whether it would promise a review. No, everything in the garden was rosy until the Prime Minister was cornered, and then we were told that there would be a review.
	If such a review is to mean anything, it should be independent, as both the noble Baroness and the Audit Commission have called for. They think that the Government are getting rotten value for money. I should like to see on the review body a parent of a child in a mainstream school and a parent of a child in a special school. I want balance and fairness in this review. If it consists solely of officers from the Minister's department and officers from local authorities, they will act as judge and jury. They are all paid to support government policy.
	Thirdly, there should be a moratorium on closures. When this was mentioned in the Commons recently, the Minister said that the Government cannot stop them. He will be aware that a Minister has wider powers than that, or he should be by now. If the Secretary of State wishes to stop such closures, he can stop them.
	In Gloucestershire, where local authority control was passed to the Conservatives, there were two special schools to be closed and the new council kept them both open. So it can be done. Once you close a special school, it is finished. If Dorton House were to close, the Government would have to spend £30 million replacing it. This is true of many schools provided by charities. They are of enormous benefit to the state education system. I would like to see a shift of power to the parents and the children in special education.
	Last week, I spoke to young girl of 16 in our school who was totally blind. She said a very moving thing:
	"Blindness is a nuisance, but it will not interfere with my education".
	That is a wonderfully courageous, determined and positive attitude and I believe that many children who are not now going to schools such as Dorton House should be allowed to share in them and gain that attitude. I beg to move for Papers.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: My Lords, I am delighted that we are again focusing on special educational needs and that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, secured the debate. I thank him for that and for his very challenging speech. I hope that he will accept some of my responses, although I leave that mainly to the Minister, obviously. I have taught special educational needs children in a secondary school, and I am a governor of a primary school where pupils are successfully integrated.
	I am reminded of the Second Reading debate on the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Bill that we held the year after I joined your Lordships' House. It followed reports that, as the Minister at the time, my noble friend Lady Blackstone, said, intended to,
	"have an inclusive society and a recognition of . . . education for all",
	supporting parents and providing relevant education for young people with special needs. I support that, but I have a couple of practical questions for the Minister that, I hope, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, will support. I do not think that the policy is a failure. I do not think that it is a disgrace. I think that things have moved on positively.
	In March 2004, I introduced a debate on the DfES report Removing Barriers to Achievement: the Government's strategy for special educational needs. Many noble Lords here today took part in those debates, but there are also some welcome new faces, and I look forward to hearing the four maiden speeches immensely. The key areas of that report still inform our debates today: early intervention and removing barriers to learning are needed; we must raise expectations and achievement and develop a national service framework for SEN. Partnerships, including the voluntary sector, were noted as being essential. In that debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, welcomed the need for research on good practice, and that is an area to which I will return today in my questions for the Minister.
	I am grateful for communications that I have had from a number of organisations, and I shall refer to some of their concerns. I begin though by looking at the policy on SEN in my local education authority, Wandsworth, where I am also a school governor. It states that proper assessment of the child is essential and then the appropriate educational setting should be found. The majority of children in Wandsworth have their needs met largely in mainstream schools; that is based on parental choice. Parental choice for the mainstream signifies why many parents opt for mainstream and why some special schools are closing. But in Wandsworth there is a mixed economy, with 10 special schools and four specialist units integral to mainstream schools. There is additional support in mainstream schools and, as I said, I have seen that in successful operation.
	Of course, secondary schools are more complex, but a will to integrate pupils, good management and resources can work brilliantly. I have seen many inspiring examples. For example, I met a severely disabled girl of 15 through the Lady Taverners, in which I declare an interest as a member. We provide equipment for pupils with physical disabilities to play sport. This girl was a keen cricketer and has spent her school life in mainstream schools. She is now hoping to study law at university. I ask myself whether she would have been able to do that from a special school. I do not know.
	The Special Educational Needs Consortium recognises that some parents seek a special school place for their child because of poor experience of mainstream schooling, including a lack of a ready welcome and difficulty in making provision. However, the consortium supports the strategy to develop the capacity of mainstream schools to provide for pupils with special educational needs. It points out that there are some excellent special schools, but that all such schools are not necessarily well ordered communities free from bullying and able to provide a sense of belonging for pupils.
	That view is supported by the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, which records powerful statements from children about feeling isolated, shut away and devalued. For example, one girl said:
	"The focus was on our physical impairments not on giving us skills for your adult life. There was no 'What is your career path?'—no focus, direction or outlook. School was a medical chemical bubble— sterile".
	One young man said:
	"After leaving school I had no social networks. I still feel affected because I didn't have the diverse experiences of a normal teenage life".
	So much for self-esteem. I support mainstream schools for pupils with special educational needs wherever possible. I recognise that it is not always possible or desirable.
	The charity I-can emphasises the quality of the setting for SEN and calls for three things, which I ask the Minister to respond to. Are we developing a country-wide mapping of need against provision so that we are better informed at national and local level? Are we using existing data to inform decisions about future provision in both mainstream and specialist sectors—for example, SEN and disability data, Ofsted inspection data and so forth? Are we collecting and disseminating examples of good practice? All that would seem to be desirable and possible.
	From the evidence, it seems that most parents want their child with special needs to be educated in the mainstream sector. Education must primarily fit the child. The child's voice must be heard, as must the parents. It is true that some stigma has been attached to special schools, and there has been criticism of how mainstream schools deliver special education. Both provisions—the mixed economy—can work together. What is key is how we share good practice and what inspections and research tell us.

Lord Addington: My Lords, this is one of those debates where it is very easy to stir up an argument and to forget that most of us are not far apart. It is also easy to talk about special schools and special needs and forget something that is recognised in a Bill that is going through your Lordships' House at the moment—the Equality Bill. A special advisory committee points out that there are huge numbers of problems and changes. The attitude one normally takes to this problem depends on which group one comes from.
	Each of the disability groups has a general approach towards the idea of disability and special educational needs. Some people feel that they have been put aside and ignored and their special schools were dumping grounds to keep them out of the way where they were not expected to achieve. Those people will be against special schools. Others, who feel that special schools allowed them to blossom and work harder, will be in favour of them. There will also be people in the middle.
	There will also be diversity among those different groups. As a dyslexic myself, I am attached to that world and its own internal politics. The group describes itself in part as "differently abled" as opposed to having a disability. I quietly point out to those people that if you are differently abled, the law does not apply to you and you cannot get any help at all. I have always wanted to get that on the record.
	If someone has a minor problem and it is spotted reasonably early—and with a little help and understanding, particularly throughout the examination system—there is not really a problem. But the same person, with the same degree of difficulty, could go somewhere where there is no understanding and the problem is not spotted. It is still the case that the parent is usually the first to spot that something is wrong. The parent-driven approach to most of the groups outside is one that we must recognise. I am glad that we did that in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Bill.
	Those groups outside, pushing forward, will ensure that the child gains an education after they have been ignored and had a bad experience of school. They have been told: "You are stupid, you aren't trying". They have been picked upon by their peers because they are different. To these people, we can see that a special school becomes very attractive.
	The lesson I draw from that is that there ain't a right way. We can jump around and fight amongst ourselves over it, but the fact is that better recognition for the hidden disabilities is key. The lower levels of autism have a similar process, although they are a different problem. We must ensure, among other things, that our teachers and staff are well enough trained to spot signs early.
	I was recently informed that the provision of special educational needs within teacher training has gone up to three days—as opposed to two hours, as I think it was, when I first studied the subject. It is getting a little better but is still not enough. Also, are we training these teachers well enough to spot a problem with which they do not know how to deal? For that is one of the great disasters: "Oh, just try harder, just work a little better". Historically, the problem has improved immensely and there have been great strides—but making sure that it happens on every occasion would be a great step forward.
	We also need to try to get groups together to talk about what is going on. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, will undoubtedly have much to say later on—I refer not only to her words but to the interpretation everyone else has placed upon her words. The noble Lord who initiated the debate spoke with genuine honesty. Words can be used and should be admired—and can be manipulated savagely. We shall see what the noble Baroness herself thinks. But the diversity of approach, and personal histories, in the problems we are discussing should be addressed flexibly. A bad special school could, I suspect, be a combination for the worst possible educational outcome—a dumping ground for those who will not achieve and who will be written off.
	One can be in almost the same situation, with slightly more bullying, in a mainstream school. Yet we must try to square the circle, because we are chasing it round having agreed on most of what should be done—that early intervention is usually the key—and then disagreeing about what should happen. Indeed, sometimes we are only disagreeing about the building where that will take place. If someone has very severe needs, it does not matter how properly we try to integrate them. If they cannot communicate with their peers on any reasonably even basis, they may as well be miles away—because they are then isolated. If you need three people to support you though your school day, I fear you probably will be isolated, and your educational attitudes must be approached differently.
	I could go into specific examples and quote a number of bodies from both sides who have lobbied me on the subject. I shall conclude by saying, first, that I hope that people will address the fact that educational needs will be expensive and, secondly, that this must be done for the proper education of a person—because school is only their first step along the line. It may seem to a lot of people, especially those involved in it, that school is everything. It is not; we are all proof that we grow up eventually—or, at least, that we get older. Finally, since there is not that much disagreement, we must stop getting hung up about labels. If we do that, we shall merely chase ourselves round and ignore the main picture.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, I declare an interest as vice-president of the National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy. I speak with proper and especial diffidence in the presence of two former Secretaries of State to whom I have been the Humphrey in my time. I congratulate the first on his speech in introducing the subject; I look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the second; and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady arnock, for her integrity in giving such focus to this issue.
	I begin by making a number of short points. First, I agree with the Disability Rights Commission that we must not regard this issue as a choice between two systems. If the noble Lord, Lord Rix, had found it possible to be here, I think that he would have wanted to say something on similar lines on behalf of Mencap. That organisation has said that it believes passionately in the question of choice, and it is pragmatic on the issue of inclusion. It says:
	"Parents who want their children to go to mainstream schools should be given every opportunity to do so. Equally, those who want their children to go to special schools should have that choice as well."
	With a Government who believe in choice—I look back to the 1995 Act, which gave parents increased rights to send their child to a mainstream school—perhaps we can look forward to reciprocal rights to go to a special school. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to the advantages of early identification. Possibly the best thing this Government have done for special educational needs is to introduce Sure Start. It gives the opportunity for early identification and for responding to children in an environment where the teacher knows her flock and where the children are at an age more readily to accept those who are not in the common mould. That is a great contribution, and there are also good things in Removing Barriers to Achievement. However, we have an inheritance that must cause us concern—a concern to put things right and to put a vision into effect in a practical way.
	I want to make a few points. First, Ofsted says that much of the expertise on special needs lies in specialist schools. Yet, it says, there is little interaction between special and mainstream schools. If we are to get that interaction—which, by referring to clusters and partnerships between special and mainstream schools, the Government clearly want—we must provide incentives to get that going to mutual benefit.
	Secondly, on special schools, this excellent Ofsted report comments on the disparity in provision between local authorities as differing by a factor of 10. In Removing Barriers to Achievement, there is reference to one local authority, Brighton, which I know is excellent in the special needs area, having 2.4 per cent of children in a special needs school, while one borough in London has 0.1 per cent. Parents need reasonable access to special schools, especially when children have profound and complex learning needs. If there is to be this transference that Ofsted wants, there must be schools to which the transference can take place.
	I welcome the Government's intention in their major new building programme for schools to consider the possibility of co-locating a special school with a mainstream school. I know that that is to be done in Guildford and I have been in discussions on it. I think that it is a very good way forward so that the children can get interaction and yet have access to the specialist facilities they need.
	Then there is the major issue of teaching expertise. The whole range of disabilities in learning for children is very great. If, as the Government say, all teachers have to be able to teach children with special needs, then they need that expertise. From the Ofsted report to which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, refers, it is evident that there are problems in that area. To enable all teachers to be competent, we need a massive programme to equip them to be so.
	Perhaps I may suggest in that context, as it is such an immense task, that within a locality there may be advantage in, for example, secondary schools collaborating, sharing the service to children with special needs, and saying, "We will become the leader"—for example—"in dyslexia". Children with dyslexia may be guided to that school, and similarly with other learning problems.
	I turn to the curriculum. I very much welcomed the broadening of the curriculum at key stage 4 so that we could respond to the learning aptitudes and interests of a wide variety of children. I think it is a bit too late to leave it to key stage 4. I should like to see it brought forward to the last year of key stage 3. By that time, the kids are beginning to say "No!" and to switch off and to become dysfunctional to themselves and everyone else. There may be a broader issue of whether key stage 3 should be for only two years.
	Then there is the issue of setting high standards. Ofsted makes clear, as I think the Government's paper does, that aiming for high standards in a school is material to the level of achievement in the school. In that context, the Government might wish to reflect a little further on the Tomlinson recommendation that there should be national recognition of four levels of achievement; they have accepted three. Tomlinson recommended an entry level that would honour, recognise and incentivise the children with profound learning difficulties to go for something that has esteem.
	Bureaucracy—we all hate the beast. I think we unite in that. But it lives! If there had been more time, I would have loved to quote how it works from an example at a school I visited. I shall send it to the Minister. It demonstrates how the system is mighty and the parent and the teacher and the school cannot contest it. I think the whole system needs to be reviewed. I will send the Minister this example which will make his toes curl.
	I have found in education that, from time to time, powerful orthodoxies are established, and woe betide the iconoclast who does not serve the orthodoxy. But I have also found in education that orthodoxies can be mistaken. We might well remember that in thinking about how best to provide for children with special educational needs.

Baroness Shephard of Northwold: My Lords, it is a great honour for me to be making my first speech in your Lordships' House, and particularly on a Motion moved by my noble friend Lord Baker. When I was elected in 1987 to another place, he was the Secretary of State for Education. His speech today shows that he has lost none of the flair and enthusiasm which then made him such an outstanding Minister. It is also a great delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, who, with other noble Lords who have already spoken, demonstrated that on this very important issue of special educational needs we should all start from the same place.
	I am going to quote the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. In her most recent publication, she said:
	"we should consider the ideal of including all children in the common educational enterprise of learning, wherever they can learn best".
	That, I think, should be our watchword.
	The noble Baroness's statement should not be contentious, but it would be incorrect to pretend that this is a policy area bathed in a warm glow of consensus. Indeed, if anyone should know of such a policy area, it would be very interesting for many of us to hear about it. But it was not always so. I am from a generation and background that experienced at first-hand the enforced inclusion of pupils with special needs—enforced inclusion because there was either mainstream schooling or nothing.
	At my 32-pupil, two-teacher primary school in north-east Norfolk, in the 1950s, we had with us two pupils with special needs: one with severe physical and learning problems including epilepsy, the other handicapped by some symptoms of cerebral palsy. But there was also enforced exclusion, because in our village of 300 or so people there was another child whose problems meant she could not attend school at all. And thus when, in the early 1960s, special schools were introduced into the county of Norfolk, some with boarding provision, under the leadership of the outstanding chief education officer Lincoln Ralphs, their establishment was rightly hailed as a triumph. The schools, with their dedicated staff, were regarded as providing an incomparable difference to their pupils' life chances, and so they did.
	But that was 40 years ago. The wheel has turned. The 1972 Act abolished the notion of the ineducable child. The subsequent considerations of the Warnock committee were enshrined in the 1981 Education Act. The ideal of inclusion in education and in the wider community rightly became established.
	The ideas that children's learning difficulties should not be subject to rigid categorisation and that, where appropriate, they should be educated in mainstream schools are unexceptionable and if one reads now the provisions of the 1981 Act they seem uncontentious. It is not necessarily the case for the many codes of practice—one of which I put out when Secretary of State—and guidance notes, frameworks for action and indeed Acts which have followed. But the question is: are things better as a result of all this guidance and legislative activity? The answer is, as usual, yes and no.
	There can be no doubt that the strong emphasis on inclusion in education not only reflects the attitudes of a more just and tolerant society but has contributed to the development of those attitudes. On the other hand, the impression—it may be only an impression and I hope that the Minister in his reply may be able to dispel the impression—given by successive Secretaries of State for Education over the past five or six years has led many practitioners in LEAs and teachers to believe that they are expected to favour mainstream over special school provision. This is unfortunate, especially in the light of the findings of Ofsted in its 2004 report, some of which have been quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing.
	For example, inspectors found that despite the many initiatives there had as yet been little effect on the proportion of pupils with SEN in mainstream schools or on the range of needs for which mainstream schools cater. Most menacingly, they found that there had been a 10 per cent increase of pupils with special needs being placed in pupil referral units and in independent special schools. That is not an overwhelming vote of confidence and it will be something of which the Government's audit—promised during the general election—will wish to take account.
	The fact that there are strong lobbies in favour of the closure of all special schools, in the name of human rights, and also in favour of the creation of more, in the name of educational rights, is not a situation new to education policy making. Indeed, given the stresses experienced by parents of children with special needs, very strong views on all sides of the argument are to be expected. So what is needed?
	First, there should be, and I think there is, a recognition from the Government that although there has been real progress, all is still not well. They must accept that statementing has become variously a means for LEAs to obtain additional funds and/or an almost insurmountable barrier and bureaucratic nightmare for parents and professionals alike, the latter seeing clearly that they could be spending their time more productively than in a series of lengthy and increasingly litigious appeals processes.
	Ministers also must accept that if they make repeated statements about the desirability of mainstream over special schools for special needs education they will be taken literally by the professionals, because that is what happens within the educational establishment when Ministers speak. It may not feel like that to the noble Lord now, but I assure him that is how it is. What is needed is a huge range of different but essentially flexible provision to provide a choice, whether it is in mainstream schools, in special units or in special schools, and most importantly—as has been mentioned—with the utmost co-operation and skill sharing between all parts of the system. Account also needs to be taken of the fact that a child's needs may change during the course of her learning life.
	It is essential that from the moment of diagnosis of a child's problems, the relevant education, health and social services should provide a seamless support system for parents, together with help from voluntary and specialist support groups. Indeed, the effectiveness with which this is done in this policy area will be a very good test of the workings of the Children Act.
	To conclude, the watchwords for progress in this area should be tolerance, choice and flexibility. Tolerance, in that we should accept what parents and teachers know—namely, that there is a range of solutions for children with special educational needs, and that range includes—and must include—special schools, and that there is not just one solution. There should also be choice and flexibility, which we hope in time and in practice will make a reality of that tolerance for all our children.

Baroness Uddin: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard. It is a great pleasure to hear her in this House, particularly in relation to special needs and education. As an outsider to the other House, I often watched her with great admiration. One is not allowed to say that from these Benches often enough, but she will realise soon that saying it is part and parcel of the way in which noble Lords behave. With that kind of spirit, I welcome her to those Benches and look forward to hearing her on many occasions. No doubt those on our Front Bench will take note of many of the questions she raised, as I do today.
	I thank the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for initiating the debate. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, for raising the temperature of the debate. It is very timely. It is a long time since the 1980s for such an important part of the education system not to be debated thoroughly. I have spoken in this House on a number of occasions on education, particularly with regard to autism and special needs. I remind noble Lords that some of our contributions stand. There is a great deal of concern out there about the current debate. I do not want to put a final word on it, but there is confusion.
	I want to take the noble Lord, Lord Baker, back to one or two points that he mentioned. It is important for us not to create uncertainties for parents. The subject is a total maze for many parents. I declare an interest; I have an autistic child of 26, and I make no apologies for making my comments strictly based on my experience. I shall refer to that in a moment. I was rather concerned to hear the noble Lord say that, in all his years, he had not once witnessed a parent saying that they wanted their child to come out of a special school. My experience of the vast numbers of parents is that they always ask that question. They do not necessarily want their children to get out, but they want to explore choices, as has been mentioned. It is critical that we bear in mind that we should not close our eyes and doors to other possibilities, simply because of our own narrow experiences.
	That said, I welcome the conversation raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. I want to share with the House a little of the implication of her work in the 1980s. Many parents hung by every word uttered on inclusion, and felt that it meant some panacea for children's rights and provisions. For many parents, that never arrived. Being honest and open about the debate does not necessarily mean that one is right to condemn previously established practice. I look forward to hearing the noble Baroness say something about accepting that inclusion has been of tremendous importance to those parents who simply want their children to be part of their society and of ordinary schooling—to be accepted as ordinary human beings.
	The noble Baroness raised concerns about assessments and the statementing process. While seeking education for my son, I had to go through a jungle of assessment, analysis, prejudice and bigotry. Contrary to the Education Act, my request to have my son placed in an ordinary school was frowned on and denied. That could be the experience of countless thousands. The statementing process is incredibly complicated and controversial. My son never achieved a successful outcome of the statement, because as a parent I never agreed with it.
	That is a dilemma. Parents can be made out to be culprits because they disagree with the process, do not understand it or simply want more from it. That does not make the process any better or the parents any more negligent, but it means that individual experiences are often denied the successful outcome that they deserve from a system that has operated totally blindly for a long time.
	Time does not allow me to say a thousand things that I would like to say. The mere existence of some of the disability organisations and our commitment to equal opportunities and human rights are fundamental to the fact that choice must be at the heart of what we desire, even if we review the procedure and these types of education. A child's right to be educated at an ordinary school is very important. Twenty years ago we chose to put people with mental health problems in institutions, behind bars. I urge us not to make this retrograde step simply because we cannot cope with the demand on our education system.
	I accept that some parents choose to send their children to special educational needs schools. I did not choose to and my child, who is now an adult, suffered the dreadful consequences to his education. There is so much more to say about life-long learning being applicable to children with special needs when they become adults. I hope that there will be a review in this discussion, and I hope that we shall also continue to support ongoing governments to try to achieve inclusion.
	We are talking about people from our own societies; we are not talking about people from some unknown element, some gutter. We are talking about our own children, so I hope we shall not return to the days when we did not respect the rights of those children. The Government are trying to do everything they can to ensure that inclusion is an important element, as is choice. I hope that the Minister will assure people like me, and others whose voices are not in the media, that inclusion is still at the heart of the policy that we shall pursue.

Baroness Linklater of Butterstone: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for initiating this debate as it is such an important subject and discussions on special educational needs in general, and the inclusion agenda in particular, sadly all too often generate adversarial positions rather than common solutions.
	I must declare an interest. I am the founder and president of a special school in Scotland called the New School, Butterstone, and I am the mother of a daughter with mild ASD. The school was inspired by Freya's unhappy experience of mainstream secondary schools until she was 16 despite the goodwill and best efforts of all concerned. We cater for "educationally fragile" children, who are at the heart of the inclusion agenda and all but a few of whom are funded by local authorities, for their needs are not severe and complex, but very real, none the less, and for whom mainstream education is inappropriate.
	When the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock referred to "fragile children" in her recently published and very important pamphlet Special Educational Needs: A New Look—on which I congratulate her and salute her both for her integrity and wisdom—I felt that we at the New School had really arrived.
	Many children with a range of special needs thrive and do very well in mainstream and that is how it should be. But how the terms "special educational needs" (SEN) and "inclusion" are interpreted is central to this debate. I shall refer to acronyms from now on. Discussion on SEN has moved from early categorisations such as MLD, SLD and EBD, via dyslexia to ASD, dyspraxia, ADHD, DCD and DAMP to name but a few, and then to severe and complex needs where medical input and long-term care may also be on the agenda. What is clear is that the range and complexity of special needs is not shrinking but growing, and that the social and emotional needs of children, particularly with ASD, can be acute and as relevant as their, sometimes quite high, academic ability. Thus, a child once categorised as MLD, and now recognised to have ASD—autistic spectrum disorder—is likely to be mainstreamed because of his academic ability, but may suffer because of his inability to cope either socially or emotionally. We know this child and his suffering very well at my school. Meanwhile, the incidence of children with severe and complex needs is becoming increasingly apparent. The Government's requirement that our current special schools should restrict their intake to this group recognises that at least these children's needs really cannot be met in mainstream.
	But where does this leave the range of fragile children for whom mainstreaming can be so difficult and damaging? These are the children we cater for in my school, and damage is the word. Lorna Wing, the renowned authority on autism, has described how people with autism have carried the damage and misery of their school days into adult life. It is unacceptable that we inflict that on any child.
	What this calls for is a far greater degree of diversity and flexibility of provision to cater properly for these needs. For it is simply not realistic or fair on teachers or pupils to ask mainstream schools to cope with this range and complexity of need. The casualties are the children. It really is important that parents and children with, for example, significant dyspraxia, dyslexia or Asperger's, which are often combined with behavioural difficulties, should have a choice of school—this seems to be the theme of the debate this afternoon. The scale and nature of the learning environment is crucial here, and for many children the size and nature of a regular secondary school of, say, 1,000 to 2,000 is overwhelming. The fragile ones drown at the back. The Government should listen not only to parents but also to professionals who understand the problem. They should be able to acknowledge when mainstream cannot, in fact, meet need fully, as every child deserves.
	As for inclusion, Removing Barriers to Achievement states quite rightly that:
	"Inclusion is about much more than the types of school children attend: it is about the quality of their experience".
	My experience is that when children reach adolescence, the gap widens academically, emotionally and socially, and can lead either to bullying or to subtle exclusion, so that the fragile child's confidence and sense of self-worth can become severely damaged. That is exclusion. Inclusion is about whether a child feels included and valued for who and what he is. It is about relationships.
	We need to be able to celebrate difference. Mainstream is no nirvana per se. Children must have a sense of belonging and achieving. They must know that they have a place in school and society where common experiences, tastes, interests and needs can be shared on an equal basis. They must know that it is brilliant to be you.
	To state unequivocally that all children, except those with severe and complex needs, should be in mainstream is actively to deny the needs of a large and growing group of children, and to deny them social justice. Indeed, as we have already heard, the results of the Ofsted report last summer were a testament to how,
	"The inclusion framework has so far had little impact"—
	and that,
	"progress towards inclusion in mainstream schools has slowed".
	The report found that children with social and behavioural difficulties are the most testing and head teachers, who should be listened to, are reluctant to admit them. Skills and capacity cannot just be bolted on to schools to accommodate these children. To do the best by them requires capacity and expertise that are not just extensions of mainstream teaching. It is special. In my school, the optimum class size is eight, and even then our very skilled teachers find that they are being stretched to meet the range of needs fully.
	Dual registration—which is just being tried—where a special school and a mainstream school can combine to work with children in an appropriate, needs-led way, is an extremely interesting new development because it has built-in flexibility. When it can also be part of the co-location of schools, it has real potential to meet need properly, combining what mainstream and special schools have to offer in the best interests of each child.
	This would have my full support and may be the way forward, provided the reality does not simply entail the blanket subsuming of special needs children into mainstream schools. I hope the Minister can elaborate on that when he comes to reply.
	Finally, there is much merit in the suggestion that special schools should have links with universities doing relevant research. There is so much new learning that we should start to draw down from across the world, particularly in Euro-science, and if our policy-makers were more aware of recent findings, such as the impairments associated with ASD, including the high rate of visual, hearing and motor impairments often barely recognised or seen, but which can collectively be so disabling, much policy would be rethought.
	The only thing that matters is that the needs of all children and young people are met to the full, so that their school experience and subsequent lives are happy, fulfilled and that they reach their full potential, whatever that may be. If the system is flexible enough to allow recognition that there is a breadth of need, which can be catered for either within or outwith mainstream schooling, then we can say that the goals of education are being achieved by all.

Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I declare an interest as the father of a 12 year-old daughter, Olivia, who is autistic. She attended two mainstream schools. In the first there was no understanding whatever of the difficulties autistic children experience in learning, and complete resistance to any outside help freely offered by the National Autistic Society.
	The second school fared a little better for the first year, but when the headmistress left it rapidly went downhill. We were told that if our daughter's learning support assistant was off sick that our daughter would have to stay at home. She was not allowed into school without one-to-one supervision.
	Of the many LSAs whom my daughter had to "teach" her, many were so poorly educated that it amounted to little more than childminding and had nothing to do with education. One LSA could not even spell her name, yet she was responsible for teaching her to read and write.
	Our story is sadly common. Many autistic children seem, at best, to survive mainstream schooling for the first two or three years. Then the gap in their personal development grows and the difficulties of teaching them dramatically increase. Even during the early years our daughter was never included in class. She could not be, as she did not understand the concept of class teaching. She sat in her own corner with her LSA all day, except for story telling or assembly. In the playground she played alone, and there was much subtle bullying. At mealtimes she could not join in normal chatter with other pupils. So by the time she was nine we gave up in despair.
	Olivia is now at a really excellent special school for girls with moderate learning difficulties. But even in this environment the school has had to put itself on a fast learning track to understand autism. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, would agree with me that autism is an extremely complex learning disorder. It is not something that teachers in mainstream schools can be expected to deal with effectively in classes of 30 and over. The noise and confusion of the mainstream world causes immeasurable anxiety for the autistic child. Even for children with Asperger's disorder, who are academically extremely able, all other parts of school life, of which there is much, is impossible for them.
	Given that one in 110 people has an autistic spectrum disorder, each and every teacher and school should expect to teach someone at some time on the autistic spectrum. There is currently an under-provision of specialist places. There are an estimated 90,000 children with autism and only 7,500 school places that specialise in autistic spectrum disorders.
	So why are these excellent schools for autism being closed down by the Government? If cost is a major factor, then consider the long-term cost on the social services which have to look after the autistic adult for the rest of his or her life. Cost would be dramatically decreased if those children were taught in autism-specific schools, enabling them to learn academically and socially and to develop their personal daily living skills, all of which are taught to a high level in such establishments.
	Special schools have a 16-plus unit in which children from the ages of 16 to 19 learn essential daily living skills such as how to take a bus, use a washing machine and gain work experience in a suitable environment. Mainstream does not offer that.
	Attempting to place most autistic children in mainstream results only in misery to the child and places an impossible strain on our already overloaded teachers. Many parents face a running battle with their local education authorities to have the special educational needs of their child recognised and managed appropriately. The time and effort taken to obtain a statement of special educational need takes a great toll on parents and children. That can be compounded by an unco-operative LEA.
	If parents can afford the costs and time of continuing that battle they can take their case to the SEN disability tribunal. Cases brought to the tribunal, both generally and specifically for autism, have increased enormously since it was established. The annual total of appeals has trebled in 10 years. Autism is grossly overrepresented in tribunal cases: almost 20 per cent of all cases taken to the tribunal involve autism, whereas children with ASD make up less than 5 per cent of the total population of children with SEN.
	That points to a lack of understanding of autism and an inability to cope with it. It may also point to a wilful attempt by some LEAs to avoid their responsibilities. What is needed is a spectrum of provision for a spectrum of needs. That is true not only for people with autistic spectrum disorders but for all children with special education needs and indeed pupils of all abilities.
	The former chair of the All-Party Group on Autism described parents of children with autism as,
	"the bare knuckled street fighters of the disability movement",
	but parents should not have to battle with tribunals, move authorities and live in fear that if their child performs too well in the setting they will have therapy or support withdrawn. There needs to be recognition by central and local government of the role of specialist provision for autism and all special needs, whether in mainstream or special schools.

Baroness Taylor of Bolton: My Lords, I am sure that all Members of the House share my concern at the experiences of those who have spoken today of their own personal experience of children with autism. I am sure that when the Minister winds up he will acknowledge that this is an area about which we are still learning a great deal. I am pleased to be able to speak in the debate on special education needs because education has been one of my long-term interests during all of my time at Westminster, although in recent years, other issues—namely, intelligence and security matters—have dominated my work in Parliament.
	I begin by expressing my genuine thanks to Members on all sides of the House and to the staff for the warm welcome and kind and gentle guidance that has been given to me and, I am sure, other new Members over recent weeks. I find myself in a rather strange position because this is my third parliamentary maiden speech. I am not being greedy. All I can say is that in my first maiden speech I advocated the virtues of recycling, so as a recycled Member several times over maybe I can contribute something today.
	My first maiden speech in 1974 was when I was the rather young MP for Bolton. Bolton is the town in which I grew up. It is the home of Bolton Wanderers, my football team, who are now in Europe, and I must admit that that was very much on my mind when I went to see Garter to discuss what my title should be. My second maiden speech came after I had crossed the Pennines and moved from a cotton town to a woollen town when I was elected Member for Dewsbury in 1987.
	Bolton and Dewsbury had many problems in common, not least adjusting to the decline of the textile industry, despite the significant successes of some specialist manufacturers. The improvements and new buoyancy in those towns today have been marked. The improvements in recent years are very welcome. I am especially delighted about the progress made in both towns in education, although there are areas that I want to see further developed. I was interested in the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, about possible changes post-14 and our further discussion of the Tomlinson report. I hope that we can discuss those matters on some other occasion and take them further.
	This debate calls for more attention to be paid to the case for special schools in meeting special educational needs. Of course there is a need for some special schools for some special needs children, but I would not want to give the impression that such schools are a panacea for all children with special educational needs or that mainstream provision is always second best. I fear that, in opening the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was in danger of giving that impression.
	I recall the debates of the 1980s with my noble friend Lady David. We were on the Front Bench in Opposition, with my noble friend Lord Kinnock. At that time, there was much emphasis on the need to integrate as many children with special educational needs into mainstream education as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, will correct me if I am wrong when she speaks later, but I do not remember anyone ever saying that every child should be fully integrated.
	We should be careful not to swing dramatically from one end of the spectrum to the other and say that it should be all or nothing. There is not one answer. The thinking behind statementing, referred to earlier, is that we should try to tailor solutions to the needs of each child, rather than just come up with theories of what should be done overall. Of course, things occasionally go wrong with statementing. It can be used by schools to try to attract extra resources, and local education authorities can try to delay to avoid spending more money. But the principle of considering the needs of the child first must be right.
	Parents should be part of all decision-making, but we must be careful. We must be aware that some parents are over-protective of their children and want them to go to special schools because they think that they cannot cope with anything else, just as other parents are over-ambitious for their children and want them in mainstream education when something else might be more appropriate.
	The wishes and assessments of the child should be considered. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, said that he knew only of pressure to go to special schools. I remember a constituency case of mine with a young girl who was wheelchair-bound and had other problems but went to the local state primary school. Her parents were reluctant to allow her to transfer with her friends to the local secondary school because they thought that she would not cope. They wanted her to go to a special school, which they visited and took her to. They argued very vociferously with the local authority. In the end, the girl showed that she could be as vociferous as her parents and was allowed to go to the secondary school on a trial basis. She had a very successful secondary education there. Her involvement in that decision was absolutely right.
	The noble Lord, Lord Baker, quoted the Ofsted report, as have other speakers. It highlighted some problems that we must acknowledge. I am not sure that the solution is simply to say, "Let's have more specialist schools". It may be that there are other ways to approach the problem. The comments of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, about collaboration and the work that is going on in clusters and, indeed, what he said about Sure Start are things on which we can make progress.
	As the noble Lord said, we must be pragmatic on inclusion. What is appropriate for one child is not appropriate for another. I had an excellent specialist school—HollyBank—in my constituency. It was absolutely appropriate for the children who were there, but other children did extremely well in local secondary schools with the kind of support network that is required. I do not think that we should try to impose one solution or one theory of what is appropriate. If we are to have a truly comprehensive education system, we must cater for each child, but we should regard them as individuals and not simply have a pendulum approach that says that everyone should be in special schools or everyone should be in state schools. The needs of each child must come first.

Lord Clement-Jones: My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, in her wise and well informed maiden speech. I have no great connection with Bolton, except that I was allowed to touch the FA Cup when Bolton last one it—I think it was about 1957—in a hotel in Victoria. It was probably the Grosvenor hotel down the road.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, had the reputation in the other place as a formidably effective Chief Whip. The other day—30 June, I think—we had three other former Chief Whips join us. We discovered the collective noun for Chief Whips—a conspiracy. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, is very welcome to the conspiracy.
	Another member of that conspiracy, my noble friend Lord Roper, informs me that the noble Baroness also joins a number of alumni who have in common another formidable person in the shape of Miss Higginson, who taught them all at various times. I include my noble friend Lady Williams, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Baroness herself. It is a great pleasure to welcome her and to congratulate her on her maiden speech.
	I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, on initiating this debate. I share his passion entirely, although I do not share his analysis. I declare an interest as chairman of TreeHouse, and vice-chairman of the all-party group on autism. Also relevant is my connection as a founder patron of the Young ME Sufferers Trust known as the Tymes Trust. I am also a strong supporter of the NAS, which has briefed many noble Lords today.
	TreeHouse is the national charity for autism education, and runs a special school for children with autism. It was established in 1997 by the parents of children newly diagnosed with autism and we run a flagship school and raise awareness of the needs of children with autism at national level.
	The noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to Nick Hornby, who is a very valued supporter and parent. To spare any misapprehension, all our children at TreeHouse are funded by LEAs. The recent Ofsted report, Special Educational Needs and Disability: Towards inclusive schools cited autism as one of the areas in which inclusion is hardest to achieve. We have already talked at length about inclusion. I welcome the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, to that debate.
	As many noble Lords, and my noble friend Lady Linklater have said, we must define "inclusion". For children with autism it must mean more than where a child is placed. Mainstream or special schools are not an end in themselves. Education for children with autism must have the long-term goal of maximising their independence and inclusion in society. Inclusion is not simply about where a child goes to school; it is about the extent to which he is part of every aspect of the life of his community.
	In that context, I believe that the key issues are threefold: skills and expertise; a spectrum of provision for a spectrum of need—echoing what the noble Lord, Lord Astor, said in his contribution; and the question of resources. I shall first address skills and expertise. Positive mainstream inclusion is dependent on the skills and expertise of professionals in teaching children with autism. It is deplorable that only 20 per cent of teachers who teach children with autism have any training at all—and that is usually for less than half a day. Autism is an extremely complex condition that requires input that is every bit as specialist as that for children with visual or hearing impairments. To address those deficiencies, there should be comprehensive training on autism for all teachers in initial teacher training. There should be development of accredited autism training programmes for all education professionals to develop their skills as part of their continuing professional development.
	Secondly, there is the question of a spectrum of provision for a spectrum of need. The debate on SEN provision—and I am afraid that we have seen some aspects of it in this debate—is in danger of becoming polarised and dogmatic, pitting mainstream and inclusion against specialist and independent. Preserving and strengthening all providers gives us the greatest chance of success, offering services tailored to each child's individual educational and social needs. That is where I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. Outcomes in terms of achievement, attainment and quality of life should be the only determinants of provision for children. Too many LEAs are currently taking a one-size-fits-all approach for children with autism, ignoring the breadth of need across the autistic spectrum.
	I advocate that LEAs develop a wide range of provision so that all children can have their needs met locally. It is vital that a broad-spectrum condition such as autism can only be met with a broad spectrum of educational and social provision, which would include autism-specific provision such as units in mainstream schools; mainstream schools where autism-specific support is provided tailored to each individual child; special schools with experience and expertise in autism and recognised home-based educational programmes. That is the objective for autism education, which is clearly set out in the manifesto of the All-Party Group on Autism, which I commend to the House.
	LEAs working in regional partnerships and schools working in clusters and federations expand the range of provision and deepen the pool of knowledge available to teach children with autism. TreeHouse has developed effective partnerships with our local mainstream schools, and some 25 per cent of TreeHouse children have informal dual placements where they spend some of their time in school at TreeHouse and some of their time in supported places in a mainstream school. Thanks to the early and intensive intervention offered in the specialist setting of TreeHouse, one of our former pupils is now thriving in a full-time, mainstream placement.
	On the question of resources, after two terms of a Government who profess that education is their first priority it is shocking to know that there are still children with autism who simply have no school to go to. Too many mainstream schools are excluding or refusing to admit children with autism. The most recent estimate is that there are currently only 7,500 specialist places for 90,000 children with autism in the UK. Even allowing for successful access to mainstream provision for half of those children, that still represents a substantial shortfall.
	It is clear above all that we need to tailor educational and social provision to the needs of the child. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, wrote in her recent report that the failure to distinguish between various kinds of needs has been disastrous for many children, which is correct. I am concerned by the way in which LEAs have interpreted government guidelines in that respect.
	Finally, I want to address the educational needs of children with ME, which may not amount to requiring special schools, but certainly requires special attention. The charity with which I am involved, Tymes Trust, runs an advice line and does a number of other activities involving children with ME. It is the biggest cause of long-term sickness absence from school. Many children with ME are still not being offered educationally suitable provision for their needs, and they are not enabled to perform to their ability in exams. Although time is short, and I do not have time to expand on that point, I hope the Minister will be able to pick it up in his closing response.

Lord Bilston: My Lords, it is a great honour and privilege to address noble Lords in this distinguished and honourable House on the occasion of such an important debate on the respective arguments for and against the need for special schools in the UK.
	Last week, I was introduced into your Lordships' House by my two dear noble friends Lord Evans of Parkside and Lord Grocott. I thank them sincerely for their help and support on that day, and for the many years of comradeship that they have given me. I have also been completely overwhelmed by the kind and generous welcome given to me by noble Lords on all sides of your Lordships' House, for which I am truly grateful. Likewise, I am equally indebted to the officers and staff for their help, support and professionalism in making my introduction to the House so smooth and enjoyable.
	The title of Bilston is taken from my Black Country town and birthplace. It is a former borough with over 1,000 years of history; an industrial town forged out of the white heat of the industrial revolution; a place of little sunshine, where the gin pits, puddling furnaces and fiery holes produced the black and grey smoke that darkened the skies and pervaded the landscape. That was the era of John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson, who built, in Bradley, Bilston, the first furnace for making iron for the commercial production of iron household utensils, which were soon to be marketed around the world. It was John Wilkinson who launched the first iron boat on the local canal and who built his own iron coffin.
	This was a landscape rich in coal, iron ore and limestone, all the ingredients to make Bilston an early industrial boom-town, where waves of migration from Wales, Scotland, Ireland and neighbouring counties changed a quiet hamlet of hundreds into a community of thousands of workers and their families, who, by their industrial knowledge, strength and resilience, created the vibrant economy by which the Black Country became known as the "workshop of the world". Today, with the enrichment of our cultural and religious diversity from the new Commonwealth and other parts of the world, Bilston is still a friendly manufacturing, metal-bashing town with a strong identity and local pride.
	I should say, at this part of my speech, that another world-famous ceramic artefact originating from my beloved Bilston is the Bilston enamel, which then Prime Minister Thatcher presented to Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev on their state visits to Britain. I am particularly proud of that achievement.
	Turning to the debate before us, I humbly call on my experience in local government as a former chairman of further and special education on Wolverhampton council over several years. In the 1970s and 1980s, the debate on the respective merits of special education provision vis-à-vis mainstream provision was very much alive and continues, with this debate, to the present day. In the case of Wolverhampton education authority, our policy was determined on one simple premise: the need of the child.
	Over many years, Wolverhampton LEA, like many other local authorities, has pursued a policy of presumption in favour of inclusive, mainstream education for all children who would benefit in educational and social terms. It was, however, evident then, as it is today, that children and young people with complex and profound learning difficulties, often accompanied with severe physical, mental and emotional difficulties, need the planning and co-ordination of multi-disciplinary teams of professionals. That includes language and speech therapists, physiotherapists, eye and hearing specialists, together with psychologists and, of course, school-based specialist teaching staff, who are all dedicated to the patient day-by-day progress of each different individual child.
	Resources, adequate space, aids and adaptations are all essential requirements for the comfort and safety of those pupils. In my view, the environment of the school and the role of parents and the community are far better achieved for those special needs children and their teachers with separate accommodation, organisation and administration.
	I pay tribute to the members and officers of Wolverhampton local education authority who, by their professional skills, seek to meet the educational needs of each child in our city correctly, whether through mainstream or special education provision. Getting the balance right is vital to the life chances of all our youngsters.
	In conclusion, I cite one very special school in the hearts of the people of Bilston—Green Park Special School—with which I have been associated for many years. The love and dedication offered to each child every day renews faith in the beauty of the human spirit and of high human values. It is so inspiring to see a child observe the bright colours of cascading lights before him and then begin the wonderful though arduous task of identifying the different colours; or the blind little girl who is just beginning to identify the different sounds of musical instruments; or the children with multiple speech impediments joining in the school choir making sounds and music that give them such simple pleasure.
	Green Park Special School has a capacity for 60 places, with ages ranging from 5 to 19. It has 100 children on its roll. It is on a very restricted site in out-of-date premises. The Wolverhampton local education authority has identified a new site. Bids have been made to the Department for Education and Skills over the past three years for funding for this important development. I sincerely hope that my noble friend Lord Adonis will take an interest in the latest funding bid, which his department will consider in September. I urge him to consider it because the new school is greatly overdue.
	To the children that I have described at Green Park Special School, like the many thousands more throughout the country, one sound, one movement, one simple recognition, one tiny step on one day is a great advance in their difficult life. A dedicated, professional staff in a suitably designed and sensitive environment is their right and our society's duty to provide.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, it is a very great honour to have been asked to welcome the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bilston. I found it an inspiring speech, and I am sure that he will find in this House a ready outlet for his talents and eager ears for further speeches.
	We need, in this London-centric House, the authentic voice of the West Midlands—and of Bolton, too, for that matter. We hear little enough from outside the radius of the home counties. To have someone who has dedicated his life to the prosperity and life of the West Midlands will be a very valuable addition to this House. He will find that this is a place where he can be himself and where he can once again confess himself a socialist. As someone who lives close to the site of the Bradley Moor volcano, we hope to hear some fiery speeches from him in the future.
	There are a couple of aspects about which I hope the noble Lord will take the chance of being in this House to change his views. I am sure that as a trade unionist he has campaigned for many years for retirement at 65. Very few people in this House wish that for themselves. As chairman of the Refreshment Committee in another place, we found him an obstacle to our pleas that we be allowed once again to enjoy the Pugin Room as a place of refreshment, and, ideally, a place where both Houses could go with equal facility. We lack a place where we can mingle with our colleagues in the Commons, although those of us who have been in the Commons can still use their facilities. In my 13 years in this place, I have found that a great disability. It produces a great distance between us, and if the noble Lord could use his influence in that direction, we should be delighted.
	Turning to the debate, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Baker for raising the subject of special schools. There are two things about special needs provision about which I am certain. The principal one is that we must reform the system of financing special needs provision. It has reached a disastrous state. The combination of duties on a local education authority to be the supporter of the family and, at the same time, the guardian of its own purse, particularly with the advance of the local management of schools and the great restriction in schools' budgets that that has produced, has led to impossible tensions for LEAs. Many of them have become extremely unfriendly to parents and have made it a great battle and struggle. I think I might wait for the Minister to pay attention to me. The LEAs have made it extremely difficult for parents, especially those who are not particularly articulate, to get the provision their children need.
	It is not difficult to see that the problem exists; there is so much evidence of it, and it is not difficult to tackle. We need to move to a model—something that the Minister's predecessor supported—where the LEA is clearly seen as the friend and supporter of the family. We need to remove from it the pressure of also being the paymaster. My suggestion for doing that would be to have a very clear vision from the centre of what was supposed to be included in the local management budget—the level of provision that was standard. We have moved to quite a substantial level of provision for special needs as standard; that is in the budget.
	Beyond that, the funding has to come centrally. That might mean through the local national health service. In any event, it has to come from outside the local authority budget so that the local authority can stand beside the parent and provide all the expertise, help and support that is needed, particularly for parents who are not familiar with special needs provision, not articulate and who do not find it easy to stand up for themselves, so that children are properly provided for. In the present situation, children may wait two or three years at a crucial time of their lives to get the provision that they need. One finds examples of children making progress because of the support that they have received but who then find that that support is withdrawn because they have made progress—as if there were some limit to what they were allowed to achieve. That is all because of the budgetary consequences of SEN and the straitjacket into which we put local education authorities. That must change.
	Along with many other people, I am extremely uncertain about a number of things. That is why we need an inquiry. We have been running the system for 30 years. We ought to know where we are. We are looking at a situation where there is a very strong bias towards inclusion, which I agree with. I am all in favour of inclusion, but many of the advocates of inclusion have become absolutist. They have said that special schools are the enemy and must all be closed. They say that parents should not be allowed to choose special schools because they do not understand what it is like to be a disabled adult.
	That sort of absolutist oppressive ideology is starting to appear in the way that the DfES conducts itself. It is there in the briefing that we receive from the Disability Rights Commission, which is soaked in that philosophy. It is there in the attitude of many local education authorities. For a parent standing with a child that they love and care for, the force and momentum behind that ideology is rather like watching an approaching tsunami. The thought of battling it is awe-inspiring.
	We must do something to return a measure of sanity to this debate. A proper inquiry—the sort that we might conduct as a House—is the right way to go. It should listen to all the evidence and produce a measured and informative report. Taking up what the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, we should get some decent research done—find some real evidence about what is going on and what is the pattern of needs.
	Inclusion is a wonderful thing. As many noble Lords know, I am the editor of the Good Schools Guide. We are in the process of producing a companion volume on schools that do well for children with special needs. There are many wonderful examples of inclusion. Many more schools that are frightened of the whole thing do not even provide the basics. If children end up going to those sorts of schools, a few years later they join the procession that comes through the great special schools which have been described by other noble Lords and which I have seen for myself. In such schools, nine, 10 or 11 year-olds come in with extreme behaviour problems and are extremely demoralised, but they go out at 18 as wonderful, happy and fulfilled children. Inclusion in the sense of being made to go to a mainstream school can be an extremely damaging experience.
	So much else has been said that I support about the need for training, understanding and a whole range of provision. I do not have time to cover all that today. A year or two of a Lords committee would be the right answer.

Lord Howarth of Newport: My Lords, I have to acknowledge that I have been round and about a bit in my journey to your Lordships' House—from Labour to Conservative and back to Labour, from Stratford upon Avon and rural Warwickshire to Newport and industrial south-east Wales, and now from the Commons to the Lords. My children say to me, "It's time to settle down and be less giddy", and I think that they are right. As the political carousel stops for me here, I alight as that rare creature—a contented politician.
	To have the opportunity to make my maiden speech in a debate initiated by a distinguished former Secretary of State for Education, and participated in as fellow maiden speakers by another former Secretary of State and a former Shadow Secretary of State, both of whom made excellent speeches as well as by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and so many other Peers who know and care about these issues, shows splendidly what a very great privilege it is to become a Member of your Lordships' House. I have long been a student of the Official Report of the House of Lords. As Minister with responsibility for special educational needs on one side of the House in another place, and as Minister with responsibility for disabled people on the other, I valued the expert authority that so many of your Lordships bring to this field and the non-partisan spirit in which this House seeks to identify decent and practical policies.
	We can remember the days when, as a matter of course and unblushingly, children were termed educationally sub-normal, or ineducable. Then, in 1972, the Conservative government legislated to provide that all children—whatever the degree of their disability—should be entitled to education. Thereafter, the commission of inquiry chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, identified principles and practices to turn that new moral vision into reality. The 1981 legislation established the essentials of the regime that we now have, and which has been developed in subsequent Acts of Parliament and codes of practice.
	The development of education for children with special needs has been part of a broader historical development—including the race and gender legislation of the 1970s, and the belated legislation of 1995 outlawing discrimination against disabled people. It was inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the United States, but was very much a product of the maturing of our own democracy and was expressive of distinctively British traditions of socialism, one-nation politics and fair play.
	However these strands may have been interwoven, we can justly claim that it has been a great humanitarian advance. Prejudice and discrimination have not, of course, disappeared from our society. At this particular time, we are acutely mindful of the dangers of their resurgence. Yet it is now the normal view in our country that we should be unequivocal and energetic in rooting them out.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock—whose speech I greatly look forward to hearing—has, in her recent pamphlet, uttered serious criticisms of the regime which stems from the report of the commission of inquiry that she chaired. Her recantation is as spectacular and courageous as that of Robert McNamara over the Vietnam War. His was justified: hers was not really necessary. I hope that she will still feel able to be proud of the formative part she has played in such social advance. She finds a crucial lack of clarity in the concept of inclusion, and proposes that all children with statements should attend special schools. I note that the Government, in their statutory guidelines Inclusive Schooling, define inclusion as,
	"a process by which schools, local education authorities and others develop their cultures, policies and practices to include pupils",
	and,
	"actively seek to remove barriers to learning and participation".
	I think I understand what that means. Inclusion is not a blanket policy of trying to meet the different needs of different children,
	"all in the same way in the same class in the same school".—[Official Report, Commons, 22/6/05; col. 827.]
	That was suggested by David Cameron in the debate in another place on 22 June. It is a model towards which we should quest, whereby schools could properly be described as inclusive because—after the adjustments made by school communities to welcome and accommodate children with special needs, and the particular provision specified in statements for individual children—all pupils are able to participate successfully in the work and life of the school.
	Inclusion is difficult to attain, and sustain. Yet it is a proper vision—in the interests of all children and society. The Government are rightly committed to inclusion, and I rejoice that the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 outlawed discrimination in education, and strengthened the rights of children to inclusive education in mainstream schools. But the Government's approach, here and in Wales, is—like most of the voluntary sector—not doctrinaire. It keeps the interests of children in steady and sharp focus. Section 316 states that a child with a statement of SEN must be educated in a mainstream school unless that would be incompatible with the wishes of its parents, or with the provision of efficient education for other children.
	The Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Maria Eagle, said on 22 June:
	"The Government's policy is not one of inclusion at any cost, but of choice for parents".
	She continued:
	"It is categorically not the Government's policy to close special schools".—[Official Report, Commons, 22/6/05; col. 870.]
	The statutory guidelines say that:
	"Inclusion is far more than just about the location of a child's school placement".
	Practice, certainly, has too often fallen far short of the ideal of inclusion, or indeed of the acceptable. The processes of assessment, statementing and review have too often been late, slow, cumbrous—and experienced by parents as adversarial. The appeals process has been a misery for many. Capacity in different local education authorities has varied unacceptably, and provision has been inconsistent. Statements in some LEAs have been disgracefully incomplete and vague. Co-ordination between education, social services and the health service has been deficient. The powers and scope for local education authorities to advise and assist schools over SEN have been too far dismantled. Training has been inadequate and teachers have been subjected to undue worry and stress on account of their special needs responsibilities. We must all be intensely concerned to be advised, as we have been by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Astor, that only 20 per cent of teachers of children with autism have had appropriate training and that there are only 7,500 specialist places for an estimated 90,000 children with autism.
	Too many children with a whole range of special needs have been insufficiently supported in their placements. Inspectors have found too many special schools, not just mainstream schools, with serious weaknesses. There has been tension between the demands of league tables and the demands of inclusion. That has contributed to an institutionalised hypocrisy, as has inadequate funding which has caused LEAs to pretend that it was for educational rather than for fiscal reasons that they were making provision that parents knew to be unsatisfactory.
	Those are serious flaws, but they do not invalidate the principle of inclusion. There have also been innumerable good experiences. I speak as a parent of a son with complex special needs who will be going to university this autumn. I can only express my deep gratitude to the LEA that supported him and the truly inclusive schools where he was educated.
	Performance in special needs education has been improving. The availability of information technology, which received a great impetus from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in his time as Secretary of State, has transformed opportunities for disabled children. Funding is increasing by 7.8 per cent for local authority spending this year. The Government have set out a strategy for improvement in their document Removing Barriers. The Teacher Training Agency has been tasked and funded to improve the quality and range of training. Advanced skills teachers, a good number of them based in special schools, will advise and support less experienced colleagues.
	A clear and continuing role is rightly intended for special schools not only in training and educating children with the most severe and complex special needs, but in pioneering new ways of teaching and learning. Special schools will form part of clusters of schools and children may be able to be enrolled simultaneously in both mainstream and special schools. The capital programme will facilitate co-location of special and mainstream schools and the provision within mainstream. Closer working is going to be required between education, social services and health, with regular Ofsted inspections at the interface. More advice will be available to LEAs and in regional special needs partnerships.
	I hope that our national debate on special needs can be pursued without dogma, sectarianism or caricature and with due respect for teachers. Whatever the present imperfections, I hope we can agree to work towards the realisation of inclusion as a dispensation in which disabled children and children with special needs are not excluded, thereby diminishing us all, but are equally valued and intelligently and generously supported to take their place within school communities and thereafter as citizens.

Baroness Warnock: My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to follow the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport. I was particularly impressed by his ability to put our present debate into the context of what has happened in the past 30 years or so in the field of special educational needs. I hope that this historical vision of how we got where we are will be continued to some extent because it is very difficult to understand where we are now unless we think back to the 1970s and where we were then. I was therefore particularly glad of that aspect of his maiden speech. I hope very much that we shall benefit from the kind of perspective he will give us in future speeches.
	I think that I must congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, to some extent on sometimes changing his mind. I shall therefore, at the same time, disclaim any heroism in my own change of mind, because I certainly did not have a great road to Damascus revelation. I was worrying away about the extent to which inclusion—or integration, as we used to call it—was actually working over a very long time. I was extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, in her excellent maiden speech, for saying that as a matter of fact we never did, in the original report, say that all children should be integrated into mainstream schools. It is amazing how few people remember that fact. But it is a fact, and I was grateful to her for that. I should also like to congratulate the other makers of maiden speeches today, which have been quite outstandingly interesting and exciting to me. I do not think that I have changed my mind in any dramatic way and I will concede to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, on that front.
	I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for initiating the debate today. It is timely because we have reached a stage where a proper review of everything since the 1970s needs to be undertaken. I join with other noble Lords in being grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for mentioning research in the area because this seems absolutely essential. We cannot get away from dogmatic posturing without knowing something about what we are talking about. That requires the finding of facts and research.
	I wish very much to reinstitute the thought that special schools are essential for dealing with children with certain kinds of disability. I say "certain kinds" because one of the things that has gone desperately wrong is the habit that many of us have fallen into of talking about children with special educational needs as though they were one coherent, cohesive category, and therefore as if one policy for educating them could be devised that would be perfectly right and all others would be wrong.
	The policy that is most popular is that of inclusion, and, as I said in my pamphlet, inclusion is an ideal that we probably all accept, both in society as a whole—and that most importantly—and in school if that leads to a better and included life thereafter.
	I will not repeat the points that were made so eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, about the children who must be educated not just in a special school but in a small school where the environment is or can become intelligible to them. She described those children whose special needs consist or rise precisely because of their inability to manage to make sense of the rackety, noisy and ever-changing environment of a mainstream school and particularly a mainstream secondary school.
	I cannot do better than to pause and remember the words that we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Astor of Hever, about the absolute impossibility of a small child who is autistic or even an Asperger's child adapting to a mainstream school. So I hope that the Government will stop referring to special schools as a lamentable necessity which must exist only for children who have profound and multiple disabilities, such as those described most movingly by the noble Lord, Lord Bilston. Such children will be better off in special schools, and must be in special schools. But other children with moderate learning difficulties, and probably other various disabilities that go with them, will benefit even more from schools with which they can identify and in which they can feel themselves properly included.
	Paradoxically, while some local authorities are closing small special schools, the Government have instituted—it seems somewhat surreptitiously and quietly—a pilot scheme of 12 specialist schools which accept only children with statements of special needs. They tend to specialise in IT and sport, and in future they may even be allowed to specialise in special needs. I have seen only one of those 12 schools, which is in Peterborough and has 420 or so pupils. It is one of the best and most successful schools that I have ever visited. My impression has since been confirmed by an absolutely outstanding Ofsted report. Is it now planned that there be more such schools, given that they are outstanding and satisfy all my requirements, at any rate, for a really good special school?
	Finally, I would like to ask the Minister another question, this time simply to unravel a confusion in which I find myself. The education Act 2001 brought together for the first time the two obviously overlapping but different concepts of special educational needs and disability. As we have heard, that Act specifically strengthened children's right to be educated in mainstream schools by deeming a school's decision not to educate a disabled child to be a criminal discrimination. However, it has never been clear to me whether all the conditions that give rise to a special educational need, such as attention deficit, Asperger's and emotional behavioural disorder, are legally disabilities.
	Common sense might suggest that they are not disabilities, but the group of children involved form by far the largest number of children who are really difficult to include fully in mainstream schools. They also form the group of children most frequently excluded from mainstream schools. If their conditions count as disability, schools are legally not permitted to exclude them. Could the Minister throw some light on the relation between special educational needs and disability, given what that Act seems to throw up. I must stop.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, it is of course a particular honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, on this occasion. I am sure that we all admire the courage that she has just displayed in saying what she said. I put it to her, however, with great respect that she should not be too hard on herself. At the time of her famous report, it may well be that the pendulum needed to swing in favour of inclusion. It is just that the pendulum has swung too far now in that direction and needs to swing back in favour of special schools. I trust that we all hope that her speech and this debate will contribute to the pendulum coming to rest firmly in the middle and staying there.
	As usual in debates of this kind, I declare my interest as the father of a 24 year-old daughter with Down's syndrome, who thus suffers from fairly severe intellectual impairment, mental handicap, severe learning disabilities, or however your Lordships wish to describe her condition. From the age of five she has been extremely lucky to attend a Rudolf Steiner Camphill community school, and last night she left a Camphill community special college, where she has been very happy for the past five years. Her education is thus formally finished, and she is delighted to be going to an adult Camphill community near Gloucester in September.
	I therefore speak with reasonably up-to-date experience as the parent of a young person whose handicap comes from birth and will remain with her for life. I cannot claim to speak for the other categories of SEN, which have been so ably represented by other noble Lords today, but feel that there may be at least one common thread which runs through and underlies all our complaints about the operation of the SEN system in this country. This is that very few of those in charge of that system have any personal experience in their close family of the children whom we are discussing. Therefore, they deal with them from theory and not from real knowledge.
	I am afraid that their theories are often inspired at their deepest level by fear: fear of the conditions with which they are dealing and by their natural desire to render those conditions as normal and, therefore, as painless as possible. That is where they make one understandable, but fatal, mistake. Their feelings seem to run along these lines: if we make these people live what we regard as normal lives, they will become normal, we shall fear them less and we shall have done our duty to society.
	During more than 20 years of dealing with officialdom in this area, including a long line of Conservative and Labour Ministers—to which position I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and in which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, took his turn, as he has made clear today—I have seen this root cause of the policy of inclusion at work in almost every meeting I have attended. There have been many meetings on behalf of tens of thousands of frustrated and desperate parents, who understand and love their children for what they really are and for what they can become with the right education in school and care at home. Yet again in one of your Lordships' debates I have to urge the Minister and the Government to share at least some of that parental insight and to see such children as they really are and not as they would wish them to be.
	I now turn to somewhat more technical reasons for why the Government's policy of inclusion in mainstream schools is not working. Before doing so, I remind the Government of the assurances given to your Lordships during the passage of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Bill 2001, as indeed did my noble friend Lord Baker in introducing the debate. The Government promised us that that Bill would not make it more difficult for parents to obtain a special school placement for their child. That assurance was given on numerous occasions from the Dispatch Box and confirmed in writing to me, and no doubt to other noble Lords, by Ministers.
	My first question to the Minister is: do the Government still stand by that assurance? Secondly, as the Government's assurance, given at national level, is clearly not being met at local level, will the Government now take action to ensure that its assurance prevails? It is not good enough for the Government to continue to say that it cannot interfere at local level. The Government and the Department for Education and Skills interfere a lot at school level. Headmasters and teachers are constantly weighed down with their diktats and other directives from central government.
	Before the Minister answers, perhaps I can remind him of a letter written some three years later, on 23 February 2004, by the then Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, for whom we all have the highest respect, to my former wife. We were in correspondence about the impending disgraceful closure of Chartfield School in Putney, in the teeth of strong parental pressure that it should remain open. The Minister's letter said that the Government's SEN strategy made it clear that local authorities should take account of a number of considerations, one of which now was,
	"that the proportion of children in special schools should fall over time as the capacity of mainstream schools to meet the wider range of needs grows, but that a small number of children have such severe and complex needs that they will continue to require special provision".
	I ask the Minister what was and is the truth of the Government's position: the assurances given during the passage of the SEN Bill or the strategy contained in that letter? They cannot both be right.
	When the Minister answers the debate, perhaps he will also consider the Government's Written Answer to me on 8 September last year, which confirmed that two-thirds of parents who go to the SEN tribunal now are seeking a special school place and are seeking to avoid being forced to accept a mainstream school for their child. That does not seem to confirm the assumption of the Government and others that on the whole parents are looking for mainstream schools.
	Whatever the Minister answers to those questions, it is clear that at local level the Government's policy is universally believed to be one of closing special schools as fast as possible, whatever the human cost, and of forcing most SEN children into largely inadequate provision in mainstream schools. It is worth examining briefly the system by which that is achieved because it may say much about the Government's real intentions.
	The LEA used to have to get the Secretary of State's permission to close a special school, but that power is now devolved to a school organisation committee in each area, which purports to represent local interests. SOCs are made up of five groups: a schools group of parent governors of all types of school in the area; the Church of England; the Catholic Church, and faith foundation schools; the Learning and Skills Council; and a county council group whose LEA took the decision to close the school in the first place. Voting has to be unanimous and if it is not, an adjudicator, who has the final decision, is called in.
	Before we get to the adjudicator, it is worth considering the composition of the SOC and how it works in practice a little further. It is hard to see how such a strong Church presence is justified, especially as their schools are close to the LEA in other ways, as indeed is the Learning and Skills Council. It is also hard to see why the LEA should be on the SOC at all, let alone control most of its votes, when the parents of children at the school in question are not formally represented.
	If the SOC cannot reach a unanimous decision, an adjudicator is called in, whose decision is final. It is interesting to note that the office of the schools adjudicator is in Darlington, but its e-mail address is via the DfES. I understand that in their guidance, adjudicators are instructed to rule with a presumption in favour of inclusion, and therefore in favour of closing special schools.
	So it is not exactly surprising that special schools are being closed across the country in the face of massive parental opposition. More than 90 per cent of parents at Chartfield School in Putney, which I have already mentioned, were against the closure of the school. The picture is the same everywhere in the country.
	Finally, in order to prove the point I am making, I ask the Minister to tell us how many special schools have proceeded to closure once the LEA has decided to close them, and how many have been kept open in response to parental pressure. That might give your Lordships a guideline about what is really happening.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for giving us the opportunity to participate in and listen to a fascinating and timely debate. I also congratulate the four noble Lords who have made maiden speeches today. They were fascinating, and I thank the noble Lords for them.
	When we consider such issues, it is helpful to start with a little perspective. It is useful to reflect that in this country today one in five children in our schools is considered to have special educational needs. That is 20 per cent of children in school today. Only one child in 30 is considered to have such severe special educational needs that he needs extra support beyond that which a school can give with the resources that are available to it. It is the one in 30 children—or approximately 3 per cent of children—who are statemented. Of children who have statements, roughly half—1.4 per cent of the school population—are in special schools. As we know from the figures in the Ofsted report that have been quoted, the proportion has remained remarkably static, in spite of the assumption that we are closing special schools. It has remained static for the past five or six years.
	We should be aware of two things. One is that the number of children coming into schools with special educational needs and severe special educational needs is increasing. That issue was noted by the National Audit Office in its report last year. The ability to keep premature babies alive means that we have more children with severe and profound difficulties coming into schools.
	We know also that—this was part of our debate on parenting the other day—we have a large number of families that have broken up and an increasing number of children coming into schools from, let us say, a difficult home background. That is often reflected in how they behave in schools, and perhaps it is one of the reasons that we see an increasing number of children with what are termed "emotional, developmental and social" problems.
	It is important to remember that there is an enormous amount of variation—that point was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing—between authorities. Some authorities have 2.4 per cent of children in special schools; in others, it is as low as 0.1 per cent. So there is great variation between local authorities. Perhaps we should reflect that we cannot have it both ways. If we are asking for local authorities to be given more discretion to do their own thing in an area where they are allowed to do their own thing, perhaps we should not complain. I want to return to that point.
	Secondly—this point is really unacceptable and was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Baker—there is considerable variation in the practice of different schools. Some schools have picked up the inclusion agenda and run with it. It is inspiring. I visited a secondary school in Newham with a unit for children with very severe physical learning difficulties. It was inspiring to see how the school coped. However, there are other schools—this is picked up very much by Ofsted—where remarkably little is done. There are far too many schools where sights are set much too low. There is a total failure to monitor the progress of those with special educational needs, where, as the noble Lord, Lord Astor, suggested, the teaching assistants are used as babysitters, and not in any sense to teach.
	The question that we have really been considering today is whether we want to go back on the policy that has been the policy since 1981 but was given a boost by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001: the presumption of inclusion. Although, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, according to the wording of the Act, the presumption of inclusion accepts that children with needs should not be pushed into inclusion. The right of the parent to choose is there. Do we want to move from that presumption to one where all those whose needs are classed as needing extra support—the 3 per cent—should go into special schools?
	Liberal Democrat policy is and has been throughout the debate pragmatic. We have always argued that there is a place for special schools. I endorse wholly what my noble friend Lady Linklater said about those with mild learning difficulties, who, nevertheless, are too fragile to be included in the environment of the rough and tumble of the large school.
	Equally, we know—contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said—that some parents very much want their children to be included in ordinary schools. We also know that, when special schools were more prevalent than they are now, many failed those children, particularly in educational terms, very badly. They set their sights much too low. One could change that, I agree.
	Nevertheless, parents have a right. If they wish their child to be included in a mainstream school and if it is feasible, it is right that he or she should be included. Our line is that the interests of the child should be paramount, and the voice of the child should be listened to as well. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, picked up the point when she said that the statement was intended to tailor the education to the child's need but the child should be listened to. I utterly agree with that.
	There is a real problem with statementing. It is not right, as the noble Lord, Lord Astor, said, that parents should have to battle with LEAs and battle with tribunals in the way that they have done. We need to look at that. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to my mind, put his finger on it when he said that the provision was driven by local authority financing of education at the moment. That began during the years of the Conservative government, when the squeeze on local authorities, the establishment of SSAs and the capping of local authorities began.
	One of the problems is that special schools are expensive: it costs on average four times as much to have a child in a special school as in an ordinary school. They were an obvious target for local authority cutting when they had to find extra money, and that has continued and continues to this day.
	Many local authorities may be faced by someone moving into an area with a child with particular needs who needs to go to an independent special school that may, as the Ofsted report points out, cost them as much as £125,000. It creates problems for local authorities. I pick up the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which was put forward in the debate in the other place by my honourable friend Edward Davey, the MP for Kingston and Surbiton: we should try to separate out the financing. The financing of special educational needs comprehends the 20 per cent, but the financing for those who are highly expensive should be carried out at a national level. It would be useful if we could move in that direction.
	I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said. The principle of inclusion is worth hanging on to if we can. I quote from the preface by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, to her new article:
	"Our idea was that there are common educational goals—independence, enjoyment and understanding—towards which all children, irrespective of their abilities or disabilities, should aim".
	The concept of all children being educatable is so important and one that we need to hang on to.
	One feature that has come through from the Ofsted report is that there is some improvement. The figure for schools that are good or excellent in their teaching has moved forward over the past five years from 54 per cent to 73 per cent in primary schools and from 43 per cent to 71 per cent in secondary schools.
	So good things can come from this. We need more training and more money. We would echo the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and others, that it would be a good idea to have a wide-ranging review of the subject rather than a narrow review. However, we do not go along with the idea of a moratorium on closures for the moment, partly because some of the proposals in hand are for closures because they are moving towards co-location and new buildings. It would be silly to stop those good developments halfway through.

Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, I too would like to thank my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking for bringing this most important subject before your Lordships' House and for introducing it with an authority that reflects his distinguished service as Secretary of State for Education.
	I was told earlier today that a sign that my noble friend meant business was his red socks. Indeed, he spoke with passion and force and it was evident that he cares deeply about the interests of what are arguably some of the most vulnerable pupils in our schools. This excellent debate also included a fine maiden speech from another former Secretary of State for Education, my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold. I expected no less. My noble friend is a most welcome asset to our Benches and will add greatly to the quality of your Lordships' deliberations in the years ahead.
	I also congratulate another former Conservative education Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, and also the noble Lord, Bilston. Their first-hand experience of this subject enlivened our debate.
	Last, but not least, my congratulations go to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, a fellow Baroness of Bolton, a fellow old girl of Bolton School and a fellow supporter of Bolton Wanderers, on her third and thought-provoking maiden speech.
	We have heard considered and effective speeches from all sides of the House. Our views on the educational options appropriate for pupils with special educational needs may vary, but we are all united in our determination to give those young people the best start in life that we can afford them; to provide them with every support to overcome the challenges that they face; and to extend to each the encouragement, affirmation and recognition that they need if they are to have self-worth and fulfil their potential—or as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, said, have that belief that it is great to be you.
	I am sure that we also have regard to the interests of the majority of pupils in mainstream schools who, although learning much from inclusion about the capacity for children with SEN to participate fully in society, themselves have a right to learn in an environment free from undue disruption. In some—indeed many—cases, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, the best possible outcome for children with special educational needs or disability can be achieved by participating fully in mainstream education. In other cases, the intensive support and more intimate caring environment provided by special schools may be more appropriate.
	Further, we believe that those who know those pupils best—their parents—are entitled to help to choose the educational provision appropriate to those children's needs. Following the brave admission of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, that the concept of inclusion, of which she was the prime advocate, was the most disastrous legacy of her 1978 report and that some needs are more effectively met in separate institutions, there is now an overwhelming case, as many noble Lords have said, for an immediate, genuine and effective review of SEN provision and a moratorium on the closure of special schools until that is completed.
	I say an effective review because the audit announced by the Government is demonstrably too narrow in its remit, confined as it is to pupils with severe learning difficulties, when the real problem arises with pupils with moderate learning difficulties who in so many cases are the casualties of the rigid and doctrinaire application of the policy of inclusion. That is why, in the absence of a proper review by the Government, my honourable friend David Cameron has announced that we are setting up a special needs commission, chaired by Sir Robert Balchin, a well known and enormously well regarded figure in the education world. There is one sole purpose to the commission: to find out what provision we must make for special educational need.
	If an audit is to be of real value, it must consider several things. It must first inquire fully into the part played by LEAs in the closure of special schools to see why so many have closed and what procedures LEAs have been following in allocating places. It should also review the balance of the law on SEN provision, so that we can properly assess what effect the current bias in favour of inclusion has and whether it should be removed.
	Parents' views matter. I am sure that we all agree on the need to support the families of pupils, who often find themselves under enormous strain. They know intimately the needs of their children—whether they are happy and whether those needs are being met. The audit should take due account of their views and address the concern that they are often left out of decisions affecting their own children.
	The time has come to face reality. The Government tend to give the impression that all is well; that pupils are already receiving the care and support appropriate to their needs; that there is no covert agenda to promote inclusion whatever the cost; and that all that remains is to fine-tune a policy that is inspired in all material respects. The reality on the ground for many is very different, as we have heard from the moving speeches of my noble friends Lord Astor of Hever and Lord Pearson of Rannoch and the passionate speeches of my noble friends Lord Lucas, the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones.
	We also heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, about parents' concerns about statementing. We must take those concerns seriously, and they merit a response.
	As the Down's Syndrome Association put it:
	"Many [LEAs] are accused by parents of cynically manipulating the statementing process to deny adequate support to all but the most vocal".
	The Parents Autism Campaign for Education has similarly found through its own survey that parents' perceptions of their LEAs were mostly negative, and that there is widespread belief that LEAs pay undue attention to budgetary issues when deciding what is best for pupils.
	As the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, said, the proportion of children who are statemented differs markedly between LEAs. No wonder parents fear that budgetary issues are taking precedence over an objective assessment of each child's needs.
	I agree with my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold. We need to build in greater flexibility so that the system accommodates a wide range of learning difficulties and meets the needs of those at the mild end of the spectrum, without conferring any form of stigma.
	There is, too, a need to rebuild parents' trust in the system and give them the information that they need. They should not have to spend thousands of pounds commissioning their own reports on their children's conditions. To quote the Disability Rights Commission:
	"Many parents of disabled children have little confidence that mainstream schools will provide a safe environment where children can reach their true potential".
	Objective guidance might actually promote inclusion by reassuring the parents of those pupils for whom it is appropriate.
	There is concern, too, at the lack of proper support for children with autism and emotional, behavioural and social difficulties. Inadequate provision has mean that there are 2,030 children with statements in pupil referral units, which suggests that the children with such needs are being failed.
	Two-thirds of all exclusions involve students with special needs. One in five people of school age affected by autism is expelled from school and never returns. The cost to society of failing adequately to care for pupils with special educational needs is immense. It is surely essential that before we close more special schools we should review the operation and effects of the policy of inclusion.
	In the memorable words of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, the idea of inclusiveness springs,
	"from hearts in the right place".
	For many, inclusion will be the answer, but the pendulum has swung too far. We believe passionately that special schools have a vital place in Britain. They provide patience with those who are struggling to learn, individual attention and special therapies, which give children who would otherwise be left behind the chance to thrive.
	It is in the name of those children for whom the obstacles are many and the learning curve is steep that I welcome and support the debate.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, my first pleasant task is to join in the congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, and to my noble friends Lady Taylor, Lord Bilston and Lord Howarth on their distinguished maiden speeches. All of them bring great knowledge, service and distinction from the world of education and beyond.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, spoke with the authority of a former Secretary of State. I am quite terrified by the number of former Education Secretaries in your Lordships' House. I meet them at every turn. I counted nine when I last totted them up. I rather hope that they do not continue to appear in tandem as they have done today, which makes them doubly formidable, especially when assisted by a former Education Minister with the commitment and passion of my noble friend Lord Howarth, a former shadow Education Secretary in my noble friend Lady Taylor, who went on to get this Government so firmly on the parliamentary road as Chief Whip and Leader of the other place, and my noble friend Lord Bilston, who is a great servant of further education and who, in an act of commendable piety, took his title not only from his home town, about which he spoke so movingly, but its further education college, of which he was, I believe, chair of governors for some time.
	We have also had weighty contributions from two of the most influential education policy advisers to governments past and present in the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock.
	The House is indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for enabling us to have this debate. A civilised society is judged by the way in which it treats its most vulnerable members and the equal worth that it accords them with their peers. Many children with special needs and the parents who care for them are among the most vulnerable members of our society, as so many noble Lords have said in the debate. Our duty to them is not merely one of care but to enable them to reach their full potential and to give them and their parents the educational choices required to achieve that potential. That is the aim of government policy.
	The noble Lord, Lord Baker, confessed to benign neglect in dealing with special educational needs when he was Secretary of State. Since he made an uncharacteristically one-sided speech—indeed, almost a House of Commons speech—it is only fair for me to point out that when he was Secretary of State his policy in his own terms, given the policy that he now subscribes to, was not benign neglect but malign neglect. He presided over the closure of some 70 special schools, and the level of spending on special educational needs in real terms was significantly lower than that which we see today.
	However, in the cause of partnership and because I am anxious that we take this forward, the noble Lord made me an offer to visit the excellent special school, Dorton House School, which I understand makes superb provision for those with visual impairment. I should be delighted to do so if the noble Lord would come with me to two excellent mainstream schools that make superb provision for pupils with special educational needs. I am thinking of two schools that I visited in recent weeks: Mossbourne Community Academy, a new mainstream secondary school in Hackney; and Lyndhurst Primary School in Southwark, about which I will have some words to say in a moment. I hope that then we will be able to take the debate forward in a more even-handed manner.
	I feared that I was going to be subject to the double onslaught of two former Secretaries of State but in fact their speeches diverged markedly. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, sought to pour acid on the Government in all our works and on almost every development in provision for pupils with special educational needs in recent years. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, made a measured speech with her call for tolerance, choice and flexibility, which are precisely the ambitions that we seek to achieve. Taking up the remark of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, our policy is pragmatic and non-doctrinaire. We accord a central place in provision for pupils with special educational needs to special schools as part of that spectrum of provision that has been so movingly described by many speakers in the debate and that we need to secure if our provision is going to be adequate.
	I pay tribute to the outstanding work of special schools, their head teachers, teachers, support staff and not least their governors; but not just to special schools. A great many schools all over the country make excellent provision for children with SEN, including mainstream schools that educate the majority of pupils with special educational needs and including, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, mentioned, an increasing number of mainstream schools that are developing special units, which often play an invaluable role in local provision.
	A key point for the debate, as made by many noble Lords, is that the main categories of schools are often inadequate in terms of describing their provision. An increasing number of mainstream schools have good or excellent special needs provision, and an increasing number have developed units. Nor is it the case that we are in any way neglecting special schools. The resources that we have made available to local authorities have enabled them to engage in significant modernisation in recent years. I shall mention just three schools that I have visited in the past few weeks. Jack Tizzard School is a special school for 80 pupils in White City which provides state of the art facilities for children with profound and multiple learning difficulties. It is bright and spacious and has the latest facilities, including a multi-sensory room, a soft play room and well equipped food technology, art, music, drama and IT rooms. The school has been completely rebuilt in the past two years and has expanded through the support of Hammersmith and Fulham Council. The parents whom I met there could not have been more positive.
	Then there is Lyndhurst Primary School in Southwark, which I mentioned a moment ago. It is a mainstream school that has developed a particular expertise in helping children with severe dyslexia. In co-operation with Southwark Council and the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Centre, a superb charity that trains dyslexia specialists, Lyndhurst is building a dedicated dyslexia unit that is due to open in September. It will take pupils with specific statements and assist both the primary school and other local schools in their provision for dyslexia at large—an area of importance referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
	It is a similar picture at the new Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, to which I referred. It is a mainstream secondary school that was designed with special educational needs as one of its core missions. Its buildings and curriculum reflect a special focus on children within the autistic spectrum. The new academy has 10 students with statements of special educational needs in year 7, all of whose parents expressed a strong preference for the academy. That is more than twice the average for secondary schools in Hackney. Parental satisfaction is very high, as I will be able to show the noble Lord, Lord Baker, when we go to visit it.
	Noble Lords have mentioned many other schools—special, mainstream and independent—with equally positive stories to tell. I could spend half my speech simply referring to the list of them and the points that they made. I note that they include Marshfields School in Peterborough, mentioned approvingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, a school that now serves children with moderate and severe needs and was one of the first special schools to take on a curriculum specialism in ICT, which she referred to. She said that she thought there were only 12 such schools; I can tell her that there are 30. We are strongly committed to seeing the number of such special schools taking on specialist status increase, and we want to increase the number that can specialise and extend their specialism in areas of special educational needs.
	The debate has emphasised the outstanding work being done by our special schools and their significant contribution to the wider education system. The Government fully support their work. Far from hiding them behind a bushel or seeking to minimise their role, two years ago we published a comprehensive report specifically on the value and contribution of special schools that I will happily circulate to contributors to the debate. That followed a working group looking at the issue of improving special schools.
	I will have more to say later about our programme of support and investment for special schools, but, before I do so, I shall briefly address the three underlying issues raised in the debate. First, there is the changing population of special needs, and the provision needed to meet it; secondly, there is the policy of choice and inclusion; and thirdly, there is the issue of statementing, which has been referred to by so many noble Lords.
	On the issue of change in the population of pupils with special educational needs, many noble Lords have recognised that the population is diverse and changing and that provision needs to reflect that. Children who may not have survived in the past are doing so, thanks to advances in medical technology. There is an increasing number of children with profound and complex impairments and learning difficulties, including behavioural, emotional and social difficulties.
	As the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Astor, said so powerfully, there have also been significant increases in the number of children identified with autistic spectrum disorders. At the time when the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, was conducting her inquiry, estimates suggested that there were four to five children per 10,000 with classic autism. Widening the definition to autistic spectrum disorders, as we now do, has raised that figure, in the Medical Research Council's 2001 report, to about 60 per 10,000 children under eight—within which, according to that study, the prevalence of narrowly defined autism would be 10 to 30. Our provision needs to improve to meet that need.
	I cannot put this better than the noble Lord, Lord Astor of Hever, did: we need a spectrum of provision to meet a spectrum of need. Indeed, most speakers in the debate, including, powerfully, my noble friends Lady Taylor and Lord Howarth, have made that point. We need to avoid a doctrinaire approach and recognise the need for a broad spectrum of provision in special and mainstream schools and between them.
	In respect of special schools, a good deal of the reorganisation of local authority provision, of which much mention has been made in the debate, has been designed to serve special educational needs better, not to withdraw provision. For the most part, the issue is not change against no change, but how change can best serve the needs and choices of parents and children in each locality.
	In the Government's view, decisions about the precise pattern of provision to meet need and choices are best taken locally in consultation with those affected and with an independent adjudicator to determine where there is not sufficient local consensus. I must respond to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson: adjudicators and school organisation committees are required by guidance from the Secretary of State to look at the needs of local children and the pattern of provision and not to have a predisposition in favour of one outcome.
	That system was set in place by the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. I know that there are those calling for us to go back to the old system, where individual decisions were taken centrally by the Secretary of State for Education, as in the days when the noble Lord, Lord Baker, held office, but we do not believe that that would be preferable. There is certainly no reason to believe that it would lead to a much different climate for the making of decisions on the future of special schools.
	Furthermore, the figures on special schools caution against oversimplification. Widely cited is the number of special schools, which have reduced from 1,405 in 1986, to 1,171 in 1997 and, since then, at a much slower rate to 1,078 last year. Yet, a good deal of that reduction has been reconfiguration and co-location, such that the number of pupils in special schools has reduced at a much slower rate from 113,000 in 1986 to 98,000 in 1997 and to 92,000 last year.
	In response to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, I point out that the percentage of pupils in special schools is rising. It is up from 1.16 per cent of pupils two years ago to 1.21 per cent last year. That proportion is higher still if one includes the number of pupils largely or wholly attached to dedicated SEN units in mainstream schools, a group that needs more emphasis than it has received in this debate. As of this January, there were 19,500 pupils in resourced or unit provision in mainstream schools, which is now more than 1 in 6 of all pupils in specially resourced provision. That reinforces the point about not simply categorising the system as special schools and mainstream schools.
	Choice and inclusion are central to the debate. It is again vital to avoid over-simplification. All that I have seen and read in my short time as a Minister responsible for this area reinforces the need to avoid a mindset that holds that for the generality of children with special educational needs, including many complex needs, there is one inherently superior form of school or that a particular type of school—whether designated special or mainstream—is simply by virtue of its title more or less inclusive for the children and parents concerned. I simply do not believe that to be the case. It is the quality of provision that matters, not the category of the school. That remark was made by noble Lords throughout the debate.
	I strongly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, in the second of the two major conclusions that she sets out in her latest paper, to the effect that in respect of special educational needs, the principle of inclusion should be defined,
	"so that it allows children to pursue the common goals of education in the environment within which they can best be taught and learn".
	That passage was also cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard. It is an accurate description of national policy at the moment, accepting as we must that the definition of the best environment for children often necessarily involves choices and an element of subjective judgment on the part of parents and local authorities, guided by the best information, advice and resources that they have to hand.
	The policy set out by Parliament, which we are observing and require local authorities to execute, is to extend parental choice and to secure the best possible outcomes for children with special educational needs wherever they are taught. The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 sets out those obligations. It removed the barriers that were too often put in the way of parents who previously wanted their children to attend mainstream schools but were denied that opportunity. It also preserves the right of parents to seek a special school place where that is their preference to best meet their children's needs.
	Where a parent of a child with special needs states a preference for a special school, there is no presumption of inclusion in a mainstream school. That is clear. Instead, the local authority is statutorily obliged to consider the placement on the basis of three clear criteria: the needs of that child; the requirement—I quote from the 2001 Act—that a placement should not be,
	"incompatible with the efficient education of other children";
	and the issue of resources.
	Supporting parents in making effective choices is a crucial part of the policy as set out in the 2001 Act, which placed a requirement on every local authority to have a parent partnership service and to make arrangements for the resolution of disagreements between parents and schools and parents and local authorities. An appeals system is provided through the Special Educational Needs and Disability Rights Tribunal, precisely to give parents, including those favouring special schools, a form of redress that otherwise they would not have.
	We can fairly claim to be doing a great deal more than in the past to ensure that the wishes of parents are met and that, where parents are unhappy about the arrangements proposed for their children, they have an effective means of redress.
	Statementing has been mentioned strongly throughout the debate. There is probably no area of educational decision-making that involves such difficulty—it is often fraught—as the judgments involved in making and maintaining statements. We all recognise—it would be absurd to do otherwise—that the current arrangements are sometimes a cause of great anguish. We also acknowledge that there are wide local variations in the proportion of pupils with statements and in the satisfaction level of parents and that the two are not necessarily connected. However, for all the calls for reform in this area, there has not, to our mind, been an alternative system proposed—apart from steadily improving the ability of schools to provide for SEN without statements, as we are doing—that would give sufficient assurance to parents that, if their child's needs are complex, those needs will be properly and conscientiously assessed and provision made for them. So we are seeking to improve the way in which the system works by boosting earlier identification and the support and resources available to all schools to address special educational needs, without parents feeling that the only way of securing the education that their child needs is through a statement.
	To make that possible, planned spending on special educational needs by local authorities is increasing this year by 7.8 per cent, which must be close to a record figure, taking the total to more than £4 billion this year. The evidence from Ofsted—here again, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, painted a very partial picture—is that much provision is improving. In the Ofsted annual report last year, the chief inspector recorded that the proportion of pupils with SEN judged by Ofsted to be making good progress in mainstream primary schools rose from 54 per cent to 73 per cent between 2000 and 2003 and from 43 per cent to 71 per cent in mainstream secondary schools during the same period. That is real progress.
	Ofsted's recent report on SEN raises serious issues that, we fully accept, need to be addressed. It recommends—we accept—that the Government should continue to work with local authorities and schools to build capacity in particular—that is what we are doing—and to provide the mapping exercise that my noble friend Lady Massey called for through the current audit of low-incidence special needs, through our investment strategy and through our special educational needs strategy paper Removing Barriers to Achievement, published last February.
	To mention just a few elements of that strategy, we have put in place a new team of SEN advisers to help local authorities build local capacity. SEN regional partnerships are bringing local authorities together to improve SEN provision in every region. Our Sure Start and under-fives programmes have a significant contribution to make with regard to early identification and provision. The national strategies for primary and secondary pupils are focused resolutely on improving basic skills and developing a more personalised curriculum that, of course, has a particular application to students with special educational needs.
	I also stress that a key part of the remit of the Rose inquiry into the early teaching of reading is to recommend on best practice in catch-up support for the 15 per cent of pupils, particularly boys, who continue to fall seriously behind in the first two years of starting primary school. That includes a significant proportion of those with special educational needs, the children most likely to find themselves subject to exclusion from school later in their career, as has already been mentioned.

Lord Baker of Dorking: My Lords, will the Minister comment on the request from myself, the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and the Liberal Party that the review to be set up should be independent and not just an internal departmental review?

Lord Adonis: My Lords, the review is being conducted by consultants for the department independently. We intend to publish the results of the review, so I do not think that there is an issue about its independence. The noble Lord is also calling for a much wider review, and we do not accept the case for that at this time.
	I have spoken for as long as I can. I will respond in writing to noble Lords on the many other points that have been raised.
	In special educational needs provision there is much excellent practice in mainstream and special schools. However, practice does not always live up to the ideal. There are considerable variations between local areas, and we need to improve further. The debate has made a notable contribution to enabling us to do so, and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part.

Lord Baker of Dorking: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in the debate today and congratulate the four maiden speakers. My noble friend Lady Shephard was the Secretary of State from 1995 to 1997—for two years at the end of that golden age. She was very popular in the education world for her great warmth and understanding, which she demonstrated again today.
	I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. I did not have to submit to her Whip in the House of Commons. She has had a strong interest in education. Her first skirmish in education was as Parliamentary Private Secretary to a Secretary of State for Education. I think that only she and I could name that Secretary of State—old Fred Mulley. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bilston, who I knew as the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South East. He shared that city with Enoch Powell—an interesting pairing. The House was very impressed with the compassionate way that he described the special school in his old constituency. What great value it gives to his constituency, and he gave to it.
	I also welcome another Conservative Minister of Education, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. He was also a Minister in that golden age. He represented the town where I was born. Like him, it has returned to the Labour fold. Unlike him, it might come back one day.
	The Minister and I know each other very well. I will visit his school, and he will visit my school. I know that he will take me to a very good school—that is what I used to do. I invite him to go with me to a mainstream school that is not doing so well. It is very important because the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is the Minister with responsibility for special educational needs and will therefore determine policy. We have the organ grinder rather than a monkey, which is very important. He has had considerable influence on Labour education policy, and I hope that he will continue to do so. He praised me—I do not think that he thought it was praise—by saying that I made a House of Commons speech. A House of Commons speech has a slightly sharper edge.
	I am not advocating a massive return to special schools; of course not. I recognise that most children will be educated in mainstream schools. My concern is to ensure that those schools do better than they are doing at the moment—they must. That Ofsted report was devastating.
	Every person who spoke in the debate used the word "choice"—every person. Choice means that there should be a choice between mainstream schools and special schools. I do not believe that special schools should be only for severely disabled children. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, said, they should also be for children of moderate difficulties. That was the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, who used that interesting concept "the fragile child". There are many of those, and those children are not, on the whole, getting into special schools. I must tell the Minister that that is the consequence of his policy.
	I hope that the review will look fundamentally at the problem. The Minister did not mention the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, in her great recantation, said that her legacy had been disastrous. There is a lot to be done in this area yet. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Weapons of Mass Destruction (EUC Report)

Lord Bowness: rose to move, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on Preventing Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The EU Contribution (13th Report, Session 2004–05, HL Paper 96).

Lord Bowness: My Lords, in moving the report I would first like to express my thanks to our distinguished specialist adviser, Sir Michael Quinlan. I thank our clerk Dr Emily Baldock and our own committee specialist Pamela Strigo, both of whom contributed to the drafting and publication of this report and ensured that it was published prior to the dissolution of the previous Parliament. I also thank our witnesses who we saw both here and in Brussels and included Dr Hans Blix and Dr Annalisa Giannella, Javier Solana's personal representative in matters of weapons of mass destruction.
	My thanks are also due to the members of the sub-committee which initially prepared this report in getting to grips with a very wide and difficult subject. My thanks to them for observing my repeated and boring injunctions that the report was not about the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or about weapons of mass destruction, but about the European Union's strategy to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
	A difficulty arises in the first place with the term "weapons of mass destruction". Some of the difficulties are referred to in our report, but despite the shortcomings of the definition we decided to use it and in this report we are in effect referring to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons although it is accepted that there may be other weapons that do not fall into that category that can be very destructive indeed.
	We have already reported on, and debated, the European security strategy. The European Union strategy against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was endorsed alongside, and as part of, that wider strategy—which notes that the European Union has a wide range of instruments at its disposal. Perhaps the most important is the political and economic power that it can bring to bear on third countries, as well as more formal actions and legal steps that it can take.
	Within that strategy, the report that we considered particularly noted five themes: the strengthening of the international system of non-proliferation; pursuing universal adoption of international agreements on weapons of mass destruction; reinforcing strict implementation of these agreements; co-operating closely with partners; and providing technical and financial help for dismantling weapons of mass destruction.
	In our call for evidence, we posed three principal questions. First, did the proposed strategy adequately cover the ground? That is, were there any particular and dangerous loopholes left, and what were the main priorities for action in a large field of activity? Secondly, how well did the strategy—and the United States' approach to policies and programmes—fit together? Lastly, how far might limited resources, and national procedures and frameworks, limit or hamper the implementation of the strategy?
	The report itself concentrates on: the scope of the strategy and the European Union's current activities; how the European Union can best add value to the campaign against proliferation; its place in the wider global context; and whether the European Union is well organised and resourced to achieve a coherent and clear implementation. We believed that we could report upon these four elements in the light of the evidence that we received.
	I hope that noble Lords will find that the third chapter, dealing with how the European Union can best add value, will also prove a useful aide-memoire to the various treaties and organisations working in the field. In regard to the scope of the strategy, all of our witnesses agreed that it covered all the necessary elements. We ourselves concluded that the strategy was, indeed, generally sound. Perhaps inevitably, we agreed with the high priority which the European Union gives to the strategy. Noble Lords may be pleased to know that there is a six-monthly progress report on the implementation of the strategy. While it does not always show progress, it means that the position is reviewed on a regular basis.
	The report, as noble Lords will have seen, makes 21 recommendations or conclusions. Time will not allow me to go in detail into every one of those conclusions. But some I would highlight, and particularly those which were the subject of the Government's response, to which I will refer later.
	I have already said that we concluded that the Union's strategy was generally sound, but we believe that there is a good deal more to be done. We are not confident, in the words of the report, that the Union has yet organised and resourced itself—as it needs to do—to ensure full implementation. The Council Secretariat has established a peer review mechanism among members. We take the view that that is useful and that it should be encouraged to ensure that all members of the European Union are doing all that they can to prevent proliferation. There are some areas where we are convinced that WMD work must be co-ordinated with counter-terrorism work.
	The witnesses whom we saw in Brussels made great play of the non-proliferation clauses being inserted into third-country agreements. Indeed, the agreement with Syria was much quoted although it has not been signed for reasons that are nothing to do with this strategy. But the non-proliferation clause will really not be of any value unless the Union establishes clearly what it will do in the event of these clauses being breached.
	We also believe that the European Union has a role in strengthening global counter-proliferation regimes and instruments and we urge it to co-ordinate its efforts with the United States, with a view to what was then the forthcoming non-proliferation treaty review conference, to which I shall refer in a moment. We also took the view that the European Union ought to accept the United Nations high-level panel recommendations in advance of that review conference, as that would be very useful. As I say, I shall return to the NPT and the Government's response in a moment.
	We believe that the UN high-level panel report contains sections of great importance dealing with weapons of mass destruction and that the European Union should give detailed attention to that. Perhaps it goes almost without saying that co-operation and co-ordination with the United States is important.
	I come now, if I may, to the Government's response. I am pleased to say that the response was essentially supportive of most of the conclusions reached by the committee in its report. In some areas, however, the Government's position was not as clear as we would have liked. Perhaps the Minister can enlighten us further today.
	The first relates to the use of these non-proliferation clauses in third-country agreements to which I have already referred. We have recommended that the European Union should establish arrangements for monitoring these clauses. It is not clear to us from the response who will actually do the monitoring. A role is suggested for the non-proliferation working group, but would that working group be advising on the basis of conclusions reached by external agencies or would it do additional monitoring? I think that the Government should advise us and let us know where they think that should lie.
	We have also urged that there be a review of priorities. This strategy, like so many strategies, contains many things that are good, but it seems unlikely that it will be possible to do them all. While I know that it is difficult to rank items that are all considered to be good, we nevertheless believe that some effort should be made.
	The non-proliferation review conference itself was a failure and no conclusions were reached. Although the government response notes that the EU co-ordinated its position—something which had a really disastrous outcome—it would be helpful if the Minister could indicate the European Union's current position and how in the light of the failure of that conference it proposes to take matters forward.
	The Government, in their response, provided a detailed reaction to each of the high-level panel's recommendations. With your Lordships' permission, I do not propose to go through those in detail. I know that it is a matter on which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, will address your Lordships, and as a member of the high-level panel, he can do so from a position of much greater authority than I can.
	We also expressed concern about resources and lack of communication between the Commission and the Council—the Commission that has the money and the Council that seems to be pursuing the policy. That was a concern expressed to us by Dr Annalisa Giannella. The Government in their response said, in effect, that all would be well in the light of the constitutional treaty, but there may be some fresh thoughts about that in the present state of the constitutional treaty.
	We are also concerned about the weapons of mass destruction centre, which was the subject of a council decision some years ago, but which has not yet been established. We would like to know what the Government's view is about the non-implementation of that decision. Their response says that it is a good thing but that they should not get involved in duplication. We would agree with that, but we believe that additional resources and additional people to take this important matter forward are needed, and the WMD centre is an important part of that.
	We are concerned about the co-operation between the European Union, the proposed WMD centre and NATO. We had a feeling from evidence from discussions that we had that this was perhaps not all that it might be, and the Government in their response do not address those details or difficulties. On the whole issue of resources, while we know the position regarding the Government's position on the EU budget and their financial perspectives, the Government do not in their response specifically state the additional resources they would wish to see allocated to this important area. I beg to move.
	Moved, That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on Preventing Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The EU Contribution (13th Report, Session 2004–05, HL Paper 96).—(Lord Bowness.)

Baroness Williams of Crosby: My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest. I am a member of the Nuclear Threat Initiative Board in the United States, sometimes known as the Nunn Lugar initiative, which I am sure will be familiar to many people taking part in the debate.
	It is very good to see that a number of noble Lords taking part in the debate were not themselves members of the committee. That is always excellent and shows the interest in the report that the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, has so eloquently initiated.
	We live in a time of great danger, and the potential threat—which, thank God, did not emerge in the past week—is so much greater even than the one that did that it is quite difficult to get one's mind around it. Had there been any element of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in that terrorist attack, we would be counting the number of those killed and injured in figures 100 or 1,000 times greater than the tragic list we know about and have considered this very day.
	The report is well informed and thoughtful, and I accept very readily its emphasis on multilateralism. In that context, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for the way in which he outlined the European strategy and the comments of the committee upon it. However, I will make one criticism. The report does not show a sufficient sense of urgency in a situation which, quite frankly, is dire.
	The late Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that a week was a long time in politics. Four months have passed since the publication of this document, and in those four months a series of dramatic things have happened, none of them incidents that make one feel any safer than one did at the time the report was published. I shall mention them quickly.
	The first was the almost total stalemate that emerged from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review in April, a few days after the report was published. The report refers to that review and calls upon it to consider some of the conclusions of noble Lords in the committee. In practice, what happened, as we now know, was that the review broke down in almost total disagreement and no fundamental decisions of any kind were made. Indeed, the final report did little more than sum up the number of meetings, the people who attended and the dates and times at which they took place. That is extraordinary in the light of the situation that the planet faces.
	The second event that occurred after that was a growing awareness that the system of conventions and treaties on which the whole peace of the world has turned since the 1960s—they have been remarkably successful—is beginning to break down. The United States refused to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty and decided to have nothing more to do with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran and North Korea decided to go ahead with developments in enriching nuclear fuels, despite the fact that both countries have been repeatedly requested by the IAEA and others to accept full inspection. Most countries were unwilling to sign the additional protocol that the IAEA asked them to sign to make its inspection far more effective. The withdrawal of the United States from the biological and toxin weapons treaty was a real blow to any attempt to establish effective control of inspection over that area of potential weapons of mass destruction.
	That is a sad list, and to that finally we must add the almost total rejection at the nuclear proliferation review of the extraordinarily far-reaching and wise proposals made on weapons of mass destruction by the high-level United Nations committee. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who was such a distinguished member of that panel, will want to refer to that. What is increasingly emerging from that list is that no one feels bound by the decisions, conventions and treaties that they have ratified.
	At the end of last year, I visited the Indian nuclear agency and asked it its view towards the non-proliferation treaty, of which India is of course not a member. The agency was absolutely clear. It said that the states with nuclear weapons did not obey and had not carried out the commitments that they made for mutual reductions of intercontinental weapons—ballistic missiles and the like. It saw no reason why it should feel itself bound when those other states did not. Members of this House will know well that there has been a real stalemate in terms of the multilateral disarmament agreed under the SALT II treaty and other treaties.
	We live in a pretty desperate situation where the fragile framework of civilised behaviour is beginning clearly to fray at the edges and where even our own nearest ally is part of that fray. Where do we stand? Certainly some of the things put forward in the report are extremely useful. In that context, I refer specifically to an interesting idea—that of linking the trade agreements to some commitment about weapons of mass destruction. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said so clearly, that is no good at all unless there are effective mechanisms for verification and enforcement. If not, they are simply more words cast into the cauldron of chaos in which we live. I plead with the Government to consider seriously pressing the EU to demand verification and inspection as parts of any future trade agreements that it may make. The idea is good, but it will fall apart if there is no effective implementation.
	Of course, Iran is also of crucial importance to non-proliferation, and all of us in this House want the diplomatic efforts made in respect of Iran to be pressed forward even more vigorously by the three Foreign Secretaries of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. If that means some discussion with the Iranians about how they could retain nuclear civil power without becoming involved in using enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, so be it.
	In that context—I am coming to the last part of what I have to say—the co-operative threat reduction proposed by the body of which I am a member, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, contains two extremely interesting ideas. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will look at them closely. They will know about one—the close bilateral co-operation between the United States and Russia, which has involved among other things the achievement of much greater security for nuclear storage in Russia. Heaven knows that anyone who knows Russia well will know how desperately that was needed. It also produced the blend-down of enriched uranium for use in nuclear power stations, so that a great deal of enriched uranium has been taken out of the Russian system and transferred into sorts of uranium that cannot be used for nuclear weapons. In that context, we must remember the elimination of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
	But, of course, there is a whole new area and one in which I would trust that the European Union might become involved. That is how far we can press forward the replacement of enriched uranium with low-enriched uranium, which is a relatively safe fuel. In that context, initiatives will be taken to propose that in Africa HEU should be replaced by LEU for research reactors, which would enable Africa to become a non-nuclear weapons continent. An extension of that—a switch under the IAEA's control from HEU to LEU—to some of our neighbours in the EU, who undoubtedly have reactor and research potential, would make the world a good deal safer.
	I also want to press Her Majesty's Government to think very seriously, in the context of the EU, about an effort to de-alert existing nuclear weapons. Most nuclear weapons in Russia are still on hair-trigger alert, which means literally a matter of seconds before they can be launched in the light of what appears to their experts and their military to be a threat of some kind. Frankly, in the present situation it is ludicrous to have that kind of hair-trigger alert system because one cannot use nuclear missiles against a terrorist threat.
	So I urge the Minister and the Government to consider pressing very hard for the removal of nuclear weapons in the Russian, American and European contexts, and to press for them not to be on immediate alert but on a slightly less high-level, hair-trigger system, which at least will give some sense of safety when talking about state-controlled nuclear weapons. I repeat that that is irrelevant to terrorism, which is another story altogether.
	I shall conclude by reading a paragraph from a book recently published, called Nuclear Terrorism. This is by a colleague of mine at Harvard, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and today is a leading figure—director of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs. I apologise for this somewhat chilling quote from Professor Graham Allison:
	"on the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable . . . If the United States and other governments keep doing what they are doing today, a nuclear terrorist attack on America is more likely than not in the decade ahead".
	I commend this to noble Lords. It is not from a wild, unknowledgeable source but from one of the outstanding experts in the area of nuclear terrorism and it is something we should all take very much to heart.

Lord Giddens: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, and his colleagues on their report. It is clear, analytical and has the virtue of being commendably short. I also found the evidence to the committee interesting. A large section of the report covers the evidence, and many interesting points were raised, some of which I want to refer to rather than sticking to the main body of the report.
	The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the most serious threats faced by the world today. It is not just a short-term threat but also a long-term one. In my mind, it is right up there with climate change and ecological issues. It is not hyperbole and it is not exaggeration to say that.
	We all know that the category of weapons of mass destruction is a loose one. Chemical weapons can be awful, but they do not have a very wide scope at the moment. Biological weapons are similar, but nuclear weapons are quite distinct. They are vastly more destructive than the other weapons included in that category.
	One should also point out that one does not need weapons of mass destruction to cause mass destruction. The events of 9/11 were produced by aeroplanes and it is worth bearing in mind that the worst case scenario did not happen on 9/11. If the planes had hit the towers at a different angle and velocity they could have destroyed them much more quickly and 50,000 people might have lost their lives in that event. One should remember that the third plane was aimed at either the Congress building or the White House, and was only brought down by the courage of the passengers. That event could have been much more cataclysmic than it was.
	One can also say that nothing is new in the world. In 1947, a high-level secret report was produced for the British Government. It looked at the threats to the country and concluded that there was no way of stopping a suicide bomber flying a plane into the Houses of Parliament. One should remember that suicide bombers pre-date recent times: there were kamikaze suicide bombers in the last war.
	Even though the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said that the report is only about the European response to proliferation, I shall say a little about what the notion of proliferation now means. It has shifted quite radically over the past 10 to 20 years. Proliferation used to mean the worry that an increasing range of states would acquire nuclear weapons. The number of states that have acquired nuclear weapons is a lot less than people feared 30 or 40 years ago. But there are now three other categories of proliferation that we must recognise and which cause massive problems when we seek to confront them.
	The first is the theft of or trade in nuclear weapons and nuclear materials. We know that some finished nuclear weapons, albeit small ones, have been offered for sale on the underground market. Several hundred cases of theft of nuclear material are known. In a substantial proportion of those cases, the culprits were caught, but we do not know what happened to the fissile material in the other cases.
	The second category is the proliferation of scientific knowledge. It has been said that there are as many scientists working in the world today as have worked in the rest of human history. One of those scientists is Professor Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Martin Rees and a range of other prominent scientists were asked by Wired magazine to give possible scenarios for the next 20 years. Some scientists said that an individual will live to the age of 150 in that period. Professor Rees placed a bet of $1,000 that, either through error or terror, there will be a single incident before 2020 in which 1 million people are killed. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, this is not science fiction: Professor Rees is one of the most reputable scientists in the country.
	The third category is the proliferation of knowledge. We live in a global information society. In my view, it is one of the main causes of the advance of democracy across the world. But it is also a world in which nothing, effectively, can be kept secret. That includes knowledge of weaponry. Again, this is not wholly new. In 1997, an undergraduate at Princeton University set out to make a nuclear weapon of a size and capability to be used by terrorists—small, cheap and easy to construct—using public sources of information. He succeeded. He did not make the weapon, but he created an effective plan to produce a weapon in the 10-kiloton range and about the size of a football that could easily be smuggled into a city. This is the age of the Internet, and the possibility of the construction of weaponry is much greater than it was.
	We are, to some degree, in a crisis with all four categories of "proliferation". The non-proliferation regime has reached a certain crisis. Despite advances that have been made with the control of fissile materials in the former Soviet Union, many such materials are still available. We do not know how to control them completely.
	Certainly, I accept that the EU can play a major role in controlling proliferation in each of these categories. I would support the commitment if it were put to effective multilateralism. Who would want to support ineffective multilateralism? I support the proposal to establish a weapons of mass destruction centre. What are the Minister's views on that? On 9/11 Guiliani, the mayor of New York, knew immediately what to do to discover whether the attack involved biological elements. He contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta; but who would one contact in this country or more generally across the European Union?
	The European Union has two problems of co-ordination. It has a problem at the top, and I have to say the fact that the constitution will now seemingly not materialise will hamper the capability of the European Union to do the things that are stated in the noble Lord's report and in the original European Union document.
	It also has a problem at the bottom—a problem of disconnection. I wonder whether reports such as this—I do not refer to the noble Lord's report, but mainly to the original document on which it is based—do not contribute to the problems of disconnection that the European Union has because this kind of document is written for leaders and experts. The people who would be subject to it, especially to the new conjunction which the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, described so aptly, are the citizenry.
	I would like to distinguish three areas where there could be an interaction between the public, government and the wider European Union, which would be important in this respect. The first, a fundamental problem for us nationally and across the European Union, is the management of risk. The management of risk for government is exceedingly difficult today. We need to consult the citizens about it. I would expect there to be proposals to do that in a report such as this.
	There is a perversity to risk, which is very difficult to manage. To get people to take a risk seriously you must proclaim the risk—if you like, you must scare them. But if you scare them and nothing happens then people will say they are the politics of fear and that it is scaremongering. If you do not do enough and a calamity occurs they will blame you for it. We must have consultative procedures to seek to deal with these issues. The most difficult of all is what one would call "low probability, high consequence risk", of which a nuclear terrorist attack is at the outer edge. It is not very likely; it is difficult to achieve; but you cannot afford to get it wrong even once.
	Secondly, there is the management of social division. It is a mistake to suppose that the threat of the conjunction of WMD and terrorism is simply linked to radical Islam. After all, Timothy McVeigh blew up a building in Oklahoma City and killed about 180 people. He was a radical rightist, working on his own. The Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan had a massive factory for the manufacture of biological and chemical weapons. It was not able to use them as it could have done, but that could have been a big threat.
	We know that we have to manage the divisions which are produced by the advent of new forms of terrorism and their conjunction with WMD. We must avoid a situation arising in this country similar to that which has occurred in the Netherlands. Surely we know that this must have a pan-European dimension.
	Thirdly, on a European level, we need the management of information. How many citizens in Europe know the difference between a dirty bomb and other forms of nuclear weaponry or weapons of mass destruction? How many people know what to do if a dirty bomb is detonated in their area?
	Terrorism will no longer simply have a national dimension, it could easily in the future have a European dimension. There is no reason why terrorists should not strike simultaneously across a range of European countries. It is not just the experts who have to be prepared, the people have to be prepared too.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My Lords, I came late to the sub-committee that drafted the report on the EU's policy towards countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for debate today, joining only when the work was well under way. I therefore hope that without failing in modesty I can pay tribute to the quality of that work, the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, who introduced the report and to the skill and experience of Sir Michael Quinlan, our adviser.
	As I remarked in a recent debate on the EU's counter-terrorism policy, counter-proliferation is another area where the EU needs to complement and supplement the work of its member states and to underpin and strengthen the work done at a global level by organisations such as the Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons and the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention—which latter, incidentally, lacks any international organisation to implement and enforce its provisions, but sorely needs one.
	It thus makes no sense to consider the EU's work in this field in isolation, and our committee did not do so, rather situating our enquiry in the context of the ongoing efforts being made by the UN Secretary-General and his high-level panel, on which I had the honour to serve, to reinforce the global regimes countering proliferation—regimes that, as several noble Lords have noted, are under considerable stress, especially following the abject failure of the recent Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference to reach any agreed conclusions.
	The European Union's counter-proliferation policy we found on the whole to be well conceived but Insufficiently prioritised and inadequately resourced—points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bowness. It is to be hoped that some of the shortcomings that we identified will be remedied during Britain's EU presidency. I look forward to hearing the Minister's response to the debate.
	We were impressed by the effort that had gone into insisting on including non-proliferation clauses in the European Union's agreements with several third countries, but we felt bound to say—there have been several references to this—that the real value of such clauses will be tested only if and when problems arise over proliferation issues with one of the countries in question. If the EU can then sustain a firm line—if necessary being prepared to modify or withdraw concessions made on the EU side—the clauses could become of real value in making the common foreign and security policy a major asset to effective multilateralism. If, on the other hand, the political will to take a tough line is absent, the clauses will be just words on paper of no real value in securing the EU's objectives.
	The proliferation threats that face the international community are probably more serious now than they have ever been since the time, about 40 years ago, when it was confidently predicted that by now there would be between 25 and 30 states with nuclear weapons. In fact, there are nine. The international inspection regimes have proved their value in Iraq and North Korea. The threats come both from specific countries—North Korea, obviously and very possibly Iran—and from systemic weaknesses. These include: the slowness of countries in accepting the IAEA's additional protocol that provides for more intrusive inspection regimes; the difficulty in meshing together the activities of the IAEA and the Security Council; and the failure so far to establish an international regime guaranteeing supplies of low-grade enriched uranium and reprocessing services for countries' civil nuclear programmes, thus obviating the need for further enrichment and reprocessing plants—the high road to getting nuclear weapons capability.
	They come also from the ability of those such as Dr A Q Khan, the former head of Pakistan's nuclear programme, to outwit controls on components and to run a kind of nuclear supermarket on the side. They come also from the slowness in destroying stocks of chemical weapons and recuperating high-enriched uranium from research reactors. Finally, they come from the absence of any verification regime for biological weapons.
	Responses and solutions for all of those problems are on the table at the United Nations in the high-level panel report and in the Secretary-General's proposals for the September summit in his paper, In Larger Freedom.
	Recently most of them received a welcome boost both in the US Congress Mitchell/Gingrich report, which was commissioned by Congress itself, and by the Gleneagles G8 conclusions. It will be good to hear from the Minister on how the Government, in their dual role of EU and G8 presidency, and as a significant member of the United Nations, will bring matters to the point of decision at the September summit.
	How will the EU's extensive network of diplomatic posts be harnessed to the task? Has any thought been given to constituting a group of like-minded countries representing different regions of the world, of which the UK should surely be one, which could give a lead in a situation when the current public impression is more of drift than purposeful progress?
	There are then the hard cases of North Korea and Iran, on which success or failure could well make the difference between an unravelling or a major strengthening of the whole non-proliferation regime. The committee recognised that there is not a major role for the EU in handling North Korea, where the lead has to remain with the six-nation group of key regional players. It is very welcome that discussions are to be resumed in that forum, although one can be a little sceptical about the prospects for progress.
	In the case of Iran, the EU is very much in the front line. The least that can be said is that the outcome of the recent presidential election is not likely to have made it any easier to handle. Much patience, perseverance and determination will be necessary. I continue to hold the view that at some stage direct contacts will be needed between the United States and Iran if Iran's security concerns are to be addressed. That is essential if there is to be a negotiated outcome.
	All that may be to no avail, and the matter may then have to be brought to the UN Security Council. In that case it will be of the greatest importance that the EU3 and the US speak and act in unison. Any reversion to the divided councils that we saw over Iraq would be disastrous and will guarantee a drift towards a situation that would be bad for all concerned.
	There is probably no region in the world that has a higher stake in the preservation and strengthening of counter-proliferation policies than the European Union. None is more vulnerable, if there were to be a major break-out from those regimes, or worse still, a crumbling of them. The latter, in particular, would bring closer the nightmare scenario referred to by various speakers in the debate, whereby weapons of mass destruction fall into the hands of terrorists. After Madrid and London, we need no reminder of our vulnerability to that threat.
	I should have thought that a major EU effort in the months ahead is justified to push forward this crucial and difficult agenda. I trust that the Minister will say that that is precisely what we are going to do, and that the omission of counter-proliferation from the list of the UK's priority objectives for the September summit was an oversight rather than a deliberate policy choice.

Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, as a member of the sub-committee, I, too, follow the chairman's reference to the role of Sir Michael Quinlan and our Clerk, Emily Baldock, for producing a readable report from complex evidence.
	It is important for the EU to have a common position. It is difficult sometimes to know where the EU has competence in the technical sense of the word. It is even more difficult to know where it has competence in the ordinary common or garden use of that word.
	The point has not been made that the EU has an interesting role. It has two nuclear weapon states—Britain and France—with the other 23 member states not having nuclear weapons capability. That means that drawing up the common position was by far the most substantial piece of work that has been done in the past year. There is no other creative work. I draw attention to the fact that the governments of the European Union have backed the draft Commission paper, so it is a position of the Council. They attach importance to Article 6, for example, which is an obligation on the nuclear weapons states to go down the road of nuclear disarmament. It is not just the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that believes in nuclear disarmament; it is also all the member states of the European Union and all the states that have signed the non-proliferation treaty. I will come back to that in a moment.
	The second example of an interesting EU common position is an appeal to the Middle East states to establish a nuclear weapon-free zone. That is extremely important. Unless there is a security umbrella across the whole Middle East we will never get beyond the position where Israel has a stake in the status quo and Egypt has a funny sort of stake in the status quo but the status quo is not one of stability.
	Reflecting on what has been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, I think that it was a black day when the NPT conference collapsed in failure. I was making the point earlier that it was not a disastrous outcome because in one sense there was no outcome. They did not even agree on an agenda. They let down the citizens of the world. If everyone is to blame for a conference that has collapsed, unfortunately no one is to blame.
	We really have to think carefully and urgently about the decline in the credibility of multilateralism. We were all brought up on multilateralism; it is logical that one has multilateralism rather than unilateralism. If I disarm before you do—we all know the nature of the argument. However, it has become a perverse sort of catch-22 in practice that no one is able to put anything on the table until everyone puts something on the table, and so no one puts anything on the table. I do not know whether the committee in New York that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, belongs to, can throw any light on this, but the game theory of multilateralism has somehow become a nightmare. We are being strangled by multilateralism.
	If I were a non-nuclear weapons state, would I not say what has been said in New York by many such states; namely that there are double standards? They ask whether we seriously want to say that they are prevented from acquiring those weapons, which they may or may not wish to acquire. On the logic that we are presenting to them—we need the weapons in case someone else has them—they all need them because we have them. That is an insane logic. Many parts of the world are signed up to non-proliferation; the whole of south America for example, which was important in the evidence of Dr Blix. Large chunks of the world are signed up to non-proliferation, but I am not sure how stable even that is if it is thought that we and the Americans, the French, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Israelis are not only hanging on to our present position on nuclear weapons but are going to for the next generation. No doubt we shall have that debate in the next two or three years in the Labour Party.
	I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens: it is not true that no one can now visualise the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have been used, not by some crummy third world oligarch but by the United States as part of what we then called the United Nations in 1945. They have been used by a civilised country. It is not hard to see that if they can be used by a civilised country they can be used by any country—of course they can. The balance of terror, until the collapse of the Berlin wall, has been succeeded by a more fluid situation, one that we are beginning to realise is no less dangerous.
	I am pro-nuclear power. Global warming and the use of finite oil and gas will lead to 20 to 40 countries having civil nuclear power, so it is essential that there is clarity on the dividing line between the technology necessary to develop civil and military nuclear power. That is difficult, as we are seeing with Iran.
	Finally, a word on nuclear terrorism. Is it technically impossible? I would be interested to know whether the Minister has a definitive form of words on that. My noble friend will know that the report tends to the conclusion that we ought to concentrate on state actors, not because they are the only actors in principle but because in practice they are the only credible actors in terms of a nuclear threat.

Lord Giddens: My Lords, my point was that anyone with the know-how, which can be easily got, can get the fissile material to build a crude nuclear weapon—not the kind that states would want, but you could wreak havoc with it. Even a dirty bomb, which is just nuclear materials packed around an ordinary bomb, could cause enormous panic in any city centre. So that comment is not completely accurate. We must worry about non-state actors because that is the way the world is going. The most significant change happening in the world is the large range of non-state actors who can intervene within and across countries today.

Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, I am glad that my noble friend Lord Giddens was able to make that intervention, with which I do not disagree. I am saying that the committee tended to the view that there was not a great credible threat of nuclear terrorism, but it is important that we clarify the Government's assessment of that. There should be more transparency, and I include in that the slightly equivocal Government response on the setting-up of the centre in Brussels, which I think is important.
	Now that terrorists have carried out 9/11 and there is no question of their lack of ambition, we need to show that the non-proliferation treaty is not a dead letter, which is what a lot of people are saying. We also need to be clear in our minds on the question of non-state actors and terrorism.

Lord Avebury: My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, his committee and their expert advisers on what I think everyone agrees is a powerful and well argued report, which should receive close attention, not only in this House but well beyond it. It deals with potentially the greatest threat to our security, and one would hope it would be considered far more widely, especially in the light of last Thursday's events.
	Several of your Lordships have referred to the threat of nuclear terrorism, and the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, has just expanded on that by saying that the threat of radiological terrorism is even more imminent. If the perpetrators of last week's bomb attacks in London could have used devices that would have killed more people, they would have done so. Considering how many people were killed and injured, and how seriously the life of a city can be disrupted with a mere 20 kilograms of high explosive, it is clear that our enemies will do their best to acquire even more destructive weapons.
	This report should be considered in conjunction with that of Sub-Committee F on the European Union's response to terrorism, and we should be reviewing that response to see whether it adequately deals with the heightened threat we now face. We should understand the ideological motivation of those who commit these appalling crimes. I wonder whether a better understanding of the intellectual universe that they inhabit would be useful in preventing them from laying hands on WMD or radiological weapons. I believe that it would and that the EU should formally pool its expertise on the subject, perhaps at the European Institute, which already does research in some areas of CFSP and JHA.
	If the ultimate purpose is the protection of peoples against WMD, as the committee says in discussing the need for better co-operation between the EU and NATO in their non-proliferation strategies, there should also be links between those strategies and their opposite numbers on counter-terrorism. The EU already thinks about the particularly worrying combination of WMD proliferation, terrorism and failed states, as Dr Annalisa Giannella, permanent representative of the Secretary-General on WMD—whose appointment we warmly welcome—emphasised in her evidence to the committee.
	But it is not clear what institutional arrangements there are for cross-fertilisation between those areas. The counter-terrorism co-ordinator was mentioned by Chatham House witnesses, although he may have his hands already full with the many European agencies dealing with counter-terrorism. But, as he told Sub-Committee F, the European Council had identified the mainstreaming of counter-terrorism in external relations as one of its five counter-terrorism priorities. That makes it even more necessary to relate policies and actions on non-proliferation to those on counter-terrorism. I should like to ask the Government how they consider that can be achieved. Is it a matter to which they would give priority during our presidency?
	The committee reported in January. As many of your Lordships have pointed out, especially my noble friend Lady Williams, since then the NPT Review Conference wrangled for a month without reaching any substantive agreement. It has been described as a disaster and a calamity. But the UN Secretary-General says that the treaty faces a dual crisis of compliance and confidence. He has issued a strong challenge to the heads of state and government who will be attending the millennium summit in September to consider the recommendations of the high-level panel which has been mentioned.
	We were pleased to see that the Government, in responding to the committee, gave answers to all the 18 panel recommendations on proliferation. Most of these of course are addressed to states, but some of them could be made the subject of EU common positions, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall. The committee suggests that the Government should specify what programmes the EU can and should carry out. But I should like to ask the Government, for example, whether we could have a common position on the negotiation of a fissile material cut-off treaty, preferably with verification, but without it if that is the best that can be achieved.
	Similarly, we say that we are in favour of the scheme that has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, to enable the IAEA to guarantee the supply of fissile material to civil nuclear users removing the incentive to non-nuclear states to develop their own enrichment facilities. Could that also be made into an EU common position during our presidency or are there any other recommendations of the high-level panel that the Minister can mention that could be adopted by Europe as a whole?
	The EU has already declared its support for UNSCR 1540 calling on states to strengthen domestic protection and export control of WMD-related material, and the policy security initiative designed to prevent movement of WMD material to and from states or non-state actors of particular proliferation concern, including the financing of such transfers. Do the Government think that any practical steps can be taken by the European Union in pursuance of those measures, such as an equivalent of President Bush's executive order issued on 28 June interdicting certain organisations in North Korea, Iran and Syria, which are considered to be agents of proliferation? If not, how do we apply SCR 1540 to transactions between European companies and the organisations named in the executive order?
	The Government agree with the Select Committee that close contact and co-operation with the US on non-proliferation is important, and this is a practical test of that principle. What other measures do the Government think should be taken at European level in pursuance of either the SCR 1540 or the PSI?
	Iran is the main focus of concerns that we have heard with regard to nuclear non-proliferation. Here, I agree with the Carnegie study which was published on Tuesday that we should abandon the use of the term "weapons of mass destruction", which conflates different kinds of threat varying enormously in their lethality and difficulty of acquisition. It is nuclear proliferation which is the greatest threat to world peace and security, especially when it applies to a state which is hostile to internationally accepted human rights values and has used terrorism in the past against its opponents throughout the world.
	The Select Committee rightly emphasises the importance of the EU's backing for the work of the E3/EU in making the Paris Agreement work effectively. There must be close liaison between the E3/EU and the IAEA, which is still trying to establish the answers to two key questions: the origin of contamination by highly enriched uranium at several sites in Iran, and the sources of equipment and components used in the centrifuge programme.
	On the political front, the litmus test, according to EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini, is whether, following the election of President Ahmadinejad, the Iranians are prepared to take part in the next round of the EU-Iran dialogue scheduled for September. Is a firm date set for this meeting? The Government say in their response to the committee that Iran must provide acceptable objective guarantees that its programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes. What form might these guarantees take, considering that Iran now has the capacity to produce highly enriched uranium, which could theoretically be used in nuclear weapons?
	Dr El Baradei is due to report progress on Iran in September, presumably at the IAEA's General Conference which takes place from the 26 to 30 of that month. That makes it too late for the UN's General Assembly Millennium+5 Summit between 14 and 16 of that month. The summit will have to delineate a policy for dealing with states that violate the NPT, whatever the outcome of the EU-Iran and IAEA-Iran dialogues, because North Korea has already announced that it is no longer a party to the treaty. An enforcement strategy is needed to deal not just with the immediate cases but with what Herman Kahn described as the "nth country problem" more than 40 years ago.
	It was disappointing to note that non-proliferation was not one of the seven priorities listed for the UK presidency under the heading "Europe's Role in the World" in the presentation made by the Prime Minister to the European Parliament on 23 June. And at the G8 summit, no new initiatives were announced to add to those that had previously been agreed at Sea Island, Evian and Kananaskis. The subject was not even mentioned in the Prime Minister's statement on the G8 summit.
	Leonard Specter of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey says that,
	"within the G8 Summit environment, the degree of high level political interest in . . . proliferation . . . may be diminishing".
	As an example, very little of the £20 billion allocated to the global partnership for securing Russian WMD assets and know-how in 2002 has actually been spent.
	I very much hope that on further consideration of what has been said today, as well as of the steadily increasing risk to the whole of the human race of doing nothing, the Government will put the question of non-proliferation much higher on their agenda.

Lord Astor of Hever: My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Bowness on securing this debate on the European Union Committee report on WMD. Unfortunately it has been a timely debate in the wake of the terrorist attack on our capital last week. I take this opportunity to commend once again our emergency services for all their work and the British public for their resolve to continue with daily life and take the terror out of terrorism. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, we live in a time of great danger.
	The report made interesting and, indeed, alarming reading. I thank the chairman, my noble friend Lord Bowness, for the report and the committee members for all their hard work, especially when they received evidence beyond the remit on which they were to report. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for his detailed comments as a member of the UN high-level panel. What steps are the Government taking to ensure the circulation of the report around the authorities of the European Union?
	The risks of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons cannot be over emphasised, as the noble Lords, Lord Lea of Crondall and Lord Giddins, pointed out and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, highlighted with chilling clarity with Graham Allison's projection that nuclear terrorism is inevitable. We on these Benches fully support the high priority given to the prevention of proliferation, particularly in cases such as Iran and North Korea.
	We welcome the joint declaration made on 29 June by the European Union and the US on their co-operative efforts to address the global challenge of terrorism and the proliferation of WMD. However, as my noble friend Lord Bowness said, we must recognise the shortcomings of the use of WMD as a term. As the committee has highlighted,
	"the potential effects of WMD, including wider economic repercussions vary widely with circumstances as do opinions about the probability of the use and the scale of harm to be expected".
	A WMD and terror, as we saw on 11 September, can be a plane full of people, or as last week showed, an Underground train or bus full of people.
	I have some issues on which I would like to press the Government. Her Majesty's Government's response to the report, on the surface, reads well. I am sure that the Minister will reiterate this in his reply. The Government agree with a number of the committee's recommendations. However, I put it to the House that that agreement goes only so far and does little to explain the detail and timetable to which the Government will work, especially in light of the greater leverage of the UK presidency of the EU and the G8. Like my noble friend Lord Bowness, I am surprised that her Majesty's Government have said so little about the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, which some have described as a flop. Can the Minister justify an alternative to that view?
	In terms of financing resources, the committee feel that this is currently,
	"inadequate to enable the EU to fully implement the WMD strategy".
	The Government promise more resources under the common foreign and security policy enabling long called for work to counter the proliferation of small and light arms which help the cycle of violence, especially in Africa and Latin America. They promise resources to meet current international commitments and the Kananaskis G8 summit pledges that are lagging, to support the IAEA and OPCW, the BTWC, Dr Giannella's office and the WMD unit in the commission. Will the Minister explain when these resources will be forthcoming? What exactly will go to each of these bodies or commitments, and where from? When do the Government envisage that all these commitments now made will be fulfilled? What are the contingency plans should they not be met?
	The decision to make resources a,
	"high priority when the authorities of the EU consider the deployment of new human and financial resources, or the redeployment of existing ones",
	does indeed seem to support what my noble friend Lord Bowness has suggested regarding the Government's rather complacent attitude. Surely, with the UK presidency, we can speed up this process. Will the Minister alter this view by providing some firm deadlines and data on what will be provided in line with their response to the committee report?
	I commend the work that Nato does on this issue and fully support the need for a co-ordinated, joined-up approach between organisations and EU members. Transparency and political will are necessities in all areas of the EU, not just the WMD strategy; however, I do not agree that a constitutional treaty would necessarily be the best way forward.
	I would also question the current situation regarding the EU WMD centre. How will Her Majesty's Government ensure that it will not duplicate work already done by NATO? What plans are there for the project's progression, if any?
	The report has merely touched the tip of an iceberg with regard to WMD. I recognise that, and welcome the commitments—which I hope the Minister will reiterate—to commission an in-depth review of the strategy, and priorities for its implementation.
	As always, however, we call for less talk and more action. There are recommendations in the report that can be put into action relatively quickly should the Government choose to do so. I would have thought that choice needed no thinking about in the current political climate.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Astor, about the response of the emergency services in London and the response of the people of London. In the past few days, I have been saying that I suspect that those who attacked London misunderstand the nature and character of the people of London. They have never been bombed into changing their way of life and values by anybody—and they will not be. I am sure that that is how it will stay. Some of the phlegmatic qualities which are attributed to the people of London appear to have been present among our foreign visitors too—some of whom also suffered pretty grievously. So I thank the noble Lord for his comments, which I echo.
	I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for his introduction to this important subject, and I thank his committee, its staff and the witnesses. Noble Lords will, I am sure, have read the G8 statement on non-proliferation that was agreed at Gleneagles. It stated that,
	"the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery means, together with international terrorism, remain the pre-eminent threats to international peace and security. The threat of the use of WMD by terrorists calls for redoubled efforts".
	We are working in all fora to address those threats. The Prime Minister said in his summary that all members of the G8 are fully committed to the fight against proliferation, and that he knew that all other responsible members of the international community share that commitment.
	If I may make a point to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, there will be no diminution of that interest by the Government. That was absolutely explicit at the G8. I hope it is also the beginnings of an antidote to the radical shaking of what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, called the "fragile framework". I should add, for purposes of clarity, that the withdrawal of the US from the biological and toxin weapons treaty has not actually happened. The United States withdrew from negotiations on a verification protocol but has remained a member—and, indeed, a depository—of the BTWC. It is not a wonderful picture, but a rather better one.
	In this context, the Government have been grateful to receive authoritative reports of this kind—and this report in particular produced by the European Union Committee. The five themes that the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, named are indeed the central ones. The report rightly paid tribute to the work that the EU has done in this area over the past decade, which has not been fully recognised. It is important to ask how the EU can add value. I hope that this evening we can have some of the answers to that.
	The noble Lords, Lord Astor and Lord Hannay, have pressed me to say more about the EU programme, as have other noble Lords. The EU has set out a programme that shows a potential to do much more, and it is true that it must first have adequate resources. That means more money, as the report rightly says, and we are working with EU partners to achieve that. With partners we are considering plans for the EU's next financial perspective, 2007 to 2013, and we are arguing strongly for more resources for the global security agenda. But it must be within the constraints of a sensible budget overall, and that means in our view a budget of no more than 1 per cent of EU gross national income.
	We also strongly support increasing the funding available under the CFSP budget. Through that budget, member states can fund a variety of non-proliferation projects. They spent more than 15 million euros in 2004, which represented 25 per cent of the total CFSP budget and was a 50 per cent increase on the previous year. We hope that the EU can spend at least as much in 2005. I know that there are many demands on that budget and there are also more project proposals than it can cover, but more money is needed; that is plainly so.
	More money alone will not increase what the EU delivers. We need better organisation of the EU's counter-proliferation structures. The EU's central institutions each have much to offer; combining their expertise with that of the member states maximises results. Developing more coherent cross-pillar policies will take time. We need a fresh approach and a new way of working, one that will allow us to tackle security issues across the board.
	The WMD strategy was a good start, and the appointment of a Personal Representative of the High Representative for WMD, Dr Annalisa Giannella, was a further important step. I am glad that she was of such use to the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness. Her role has helped to keep up the momentum in implementing the strategy. Real progress has been made in the four pillars of the strategy. As the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, the review mechanism is very important in ensuring that the progress has real credibility.
	I should like to report that, as, I think, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, the responsibility for monitoring the implementation of the WMD clause lies with the working group on non-proliferation. The working group will consider the advice of the relevant agencies, whether those in the European Union, the member states or other expert organisations such as the IAEA and the OPCW, as well as information from bilateral and multilateral contacts. If there is strong evidence that the clause has been breached in the monitoring process, the working group would make a recommendation to the European Council to take action.
	The EU remains committed to the multilateral treaty system. It provides the legal and normative basis for non-proliferation, but it needs to be strengthened. Those who break the rules—the review shows where they break the rules—must be dealt with and dealt with firmly. The EU adds value as a diplomatic multiplier in that process. Twenty-five countries now speak with one voice to promote action against proliferation. For example, the EU is campaigning to encourage all countries to adopt additional protocols. That gives the IAEA extra access to countries' facilities, and it can help them find out whether countries are diverting nuclear material for weapons processes. The EU is not a party to the NPT or to the other non-proliferation treaties for obvious reasons, but it can help strengthen the multilateral non-proliferation regime.
	I give another example. The EU agreed a common position to guide its contribution to the recent NPT review conference. There have been a number of comments about that conference in your Lordships' House this evening. I also regret that the conference was not able to produce a substantive final document, although that was due partly to the fact that it was delayed in its start and in its negotiations. However, the conference debated and provided further consensus on a number of important issues, such as withdrawal from the treaty, the universalisation of rigorous safeguard standards through the IAEA additional protocol and the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies, all issues that have been passed on to further fora for further developmental work, leaving a leading role for the EU to take full part.
	It is, however, true—I will not describe it as a failure this evening—that a small group of countries seemed determined from the outset to ensure that no substantive outcome was achieved. That is plainly a matter that we all regret. However, I think that it is now the case that the Gleneagles process has carried matters further forward. The EU is funding a project to help states accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention and implement fully its provisions. It has also promoted the challenge inspection mechanism within the convention, and it is now considering how to support the implementation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
	Multilateralism is not just about treaties. The export control regimes play a central role in the fight against proliferation. With a single market it is particularly important that the EU should act effectively in this area. One initiative has been the peer review of export controls on dual-use items. Member states have been examining one another's systems. The lessons that they have learnt have helped them to tighten controls and so peer review is potentially a very powerful tool and we are looking at other areas that could benefit from it.
	The EU is also stepping up its outreach programmes to help raise standards worldwide. Sometimes third-country controls and institutions are not sufficiently developed to respond effectively to threat. We can offer technical assistance and we should do so. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
	My noble friend Lord Giddens and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, have been absolutely right to talk about the terrorist acquisition of WMD. I say to my noble friend Lord Lea that this is one of the areas where it is impossible other than to agree that this is where a very significant threat exists. The EU is a strong supporter of the efforts to prevent it. All 25 member states have endorsed proliferation security initiatives. The EU has been a strong supporter of the UN Security Council Resolution 1540. It has produced its own report on what the EU is doing at Community level to strengthen and deal with export and transit controls. These measures help ensure that dangerous materials do not fall into terrorist hands, although the efforts among terrorists to acquire these materials is plain.
	Although I accept the point of my noble friend Lord Giddens about the spread of knowledge, as I am sure he would agree, despite that spread of knowledge and the ease with which that can happen, we none the less have to try to act to interdict it as much as we can because what else could we do? We are working in a variety of areas, bilaterally and through the EU, and we are attempting as far as we ever humanly can to ensure that terrorists do not acquire WMD.
	All this depends on a stable regional and international environment. Noble Lords have also talked about that. The European Commission has pledged €1 billion over 10 years to the global partnership in this endeavour. Some of the money has already been used—as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, quite rightly said—to destroy the chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union. There are also the issues about its nuclear stockpiles and improving nuclear security.
	The UK is co-sponsoring with the Commission a project to ensure that future money is spent where the EU can make the most impact. It is not the EU's responsibility alone; third countries have these responsibilities as well. If they want to benefit from the trade agreements that they seek then plainly they will have to meet their responsibilities. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, asked me to put it in those terms, and I do so.
	We are working closely with partners. We are maintaining dialogues with partners including the United States, Russia and many others. In addition, member states' own bilateral discussions are moving matters forward. There will be occasions when I suspect that there will be disagreements, but there is a far greater convergence than divergence at the moment in these key discussions.
	As I have said, the structures of the Union are working hard on counter-proliferation efforts and combining the expertise with member states makes a real difference. The six-monthly debates in the European Council are an important way of checking that.
	The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, asked, as other noble Lords have, about the WMD centre. I will deal with that briefly. It will be a valuable addition to the EU counter-proliferation work and to be truly effective the centre must fully involve the EU institutions and member states. That is candidly not easy as it means adopting a fresh approach and a new way of working that we are advocating. The Council secretariat is currently working on a proposal for such a centre. It is working hard on it. We will work with it to ensure during the presidency that the proposal complements existing efforts and does not duplicate them—in particular, that it does not duplicate the NATO WMD centre.
	I can differentiate between what the two should do. A strong EU–NATO relationship is very important. The contribution that can plainly be made by the EU is that it is better placed to use its diplomatic and political tools. It has the capacity to undertake projects in third countries, and we agree with the report's recommendation that the institution should do that. NATO on the other hand is a military body, and it has developed unique expertise in countering chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks. There is no point them duplicating those functions, but noble Lords will agree that the complementarity of those functions is vital.
	I can say in response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, about a centre being a known centre in the same way in which Atlanta was, only that although we have not broadcast it as vigorously, during last week's attacks I am glad to say that very well rehearsed systems moved into place and worked. People were able to get in touch with the expertise needed, and I hope that the House will allow me to leave that at that point this evening.
	I am very close to the end of what I can say. I will take up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, about nuclear weapons and immediate alerts and discuss it with colleagues in the appropriate departments. I thank her for raising the matter. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that we are keen to look for ways to ensure that suitably robust and progressive language on non-proliferation is in the summit outcome document in the autumn. Participation in an appropriately formed working group would be a good way of ensuring that that happens, as he suggests. Any such involvement will be in addition to the work that we perform as the presidency with the Secretary-General and the EU members. My experience of Gleneagles was that everyone there was very keen to take things forward in that way, particularly after the relative lack of success in other discussions.
	The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, asked a number of important questions. The EU is working on pooling expertise. Part of the EU's counter-terrorism action plan is to agree by the end of the year a common EU strategy on tackling radicalisation and recruitment to terrorism, problems that we all face. He and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, talked about EU policies and actions on non-proliferation being related to those on counter-terrorism, and I agree that they have to be associated with each other. The Government's international strategic priority No. 1 is intended to cover both threats, and we must ensure that the policy in each area relates to and complements the other. There is a longer answer, but that is the bones of it.
	The common position on a fissile material cut-off treaty was raised by a couple of noble Lords. We continue to think that the immediate start of negotiations on an FMCT at the conference on disarmament is a priority. We would prefer to see a verifiable FMCT, but we have been encouraging the commencement of negotiations without preconditions to prevent any further delays. That is consistent with the EU common position presented by the review conference on nuclear non-proliferation, which we strongly support. We have a similar level of support for the IAEA proposals for guarantee of fissile material to civil nuclear users. There has to be development in that work as well.
	There are a number of other proposals from the UN high-level panel that could become part of the EU common position. Negotiations on many of those are proceeding at the moment. I am more than happy to—

Lord Lyell: My Lords, I understand that the time for the debate has elapsed. Does the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, wish to withdraw his Motion?

Lord Bowness: My Lords, with respect, it is not a matter of withdrawing the Motion. The Motion is that the House take note of the report.

Lord Lyell: I apologise, my Lords.

On Question, Motion agreed to.
	House adjourned at five minutes past seven o'clock.